Summer 2018
This summer hasn’t been good for outdoor flowers. Oh well, maybe better luck next year.
I took a photo of a grasshopper with my cell phone and with my Sony a5100. Can you tell the difference? I thought the cell phone photo was remarkably good.
Orchid repotting tips
When your potting material looks like it’s old, e.g., crumbling or when your roots are getting too crowded, it’s time to repot. As I mentioned before, we prefer bark over moss. We ordered our bark based potting mixture from Orchids by Hausermann. We missed their open house this year, which is when we stock up on supplies.
Soak the new bark potting mixture overnight. We put something over the top to weigh down the bark. After you remove the old potting material, cut out the damaged roots. They should be obviously dead, e.g. shriveled and squishy. You can soak the roots in some water before putting in the new potting mixture. The staff at Hausermann said the most common mistake is to not pack the bark in tight enough. Sorry I can’t give you info on what is too tight or not tight enough. You certainly don’t want the plant to be loose when you are handling the pot.
Hopefully you can see the difference, before and after repotting.
More specific care tips here:
https://www.orchidsbyhausermann.com/care.htm
Previous post here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadHaney/posts/7GscQRsi1Ce
Supplies mentioned can be purchased here:
Neighborhood hawk
I’m really disappointed I couldn’t get my real camera in time. When I got back from walking Ana this morning, she disturbed this hawk and it flew across the backyard up to this power line. I took a few pics with my cell phone but by the time I had my real camera with telephoto lens, it was long gone.
Not much to show for flowers this summer. Too much rain and not enough sunshine. We kind of messed up and didn’t put our cosmos and marigold seedlings in bigger containers soon enough. We lost almost all of them. We will learn from this and hopefully do better next year. The blazing stars were pretty sad, partly due to the rabbits and squirrels. The squirrels have eaten the buds on all of our dahlias. They should have had several flowers by now but there just hasn’t been enough sunlight for them.
Saw this magnificent monarch butterfly, most likely part of the annual migration.