The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Down Range Cafe => Topic started by: Big Frank on March 29, 2023, 09:22:38 AM
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When spring was about to begin and my tulips, etc. started growing, I realized I took some pictures of flowers in my yard last spring but didn't post them. A week ago Bing Wallpaper's daily background was Crocus flowers and that was another reminder. So a couple days ago I resized my pictures down from whatever mega-size they were to 1,200 pixels. I trimmed most down to 1.000 pixels because the other 200 pixels were wasted space. I had multiple shots of most and picked one to keep. But I don't have any crocuses. I know I had a nice bunch of them growing in the front lawn as usual, and if I recall correctly I was going to take a picture the next day. Maybe frost killed them, or it rained and I stayed in for a few days then forgot, but I didn't get a picture. But I think last spring was when I carefully mowed around them, thought that I won't be doing that again, and immediately mowed them down.
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Daffydowndilly. Would you believe that's what daffodils used to be called?
Grape Hyacinth. Bad pics of good flowers early in the season.
Tulips.
Tulips later in the season. Many of the poppies I had in front of my porch were the same color.
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Star of Bethlehem next to my shed. I don't know what the tiny purple flowers under it are. Lilies next to the front porch. The ex and I planted Stargazer lilies plated somewhere but this isn't it. This looks like some kind of Tiger lily to me. It was probably already growing here when I bought the house in 1991. But when you buy flowers, and especially bulbs, you never know what you're actually buying and we may have planted it. I had to trim some pictures again in both posts to get them under 500k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilium_%27Stargazer%27
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Pics I took with my digital camera instead of my phone, so no telling how old they are, but probably two or three years ago. The tulips are on either side of the steps on my front porch. I used to have a lot of daises in front of my front porch, but don't remember having many, or any, last year. I'm down to basically just tulips and a couple of daffodils where there used to be dozens of kinds of wildflowers. If we hadn't planted bulbs too, there would be nothing but grass to mow, which means this fall is a good time to move them out of there.
For the last few years I've been thinking about digging up the lilies and breaking up the bulbs. That way I could spread them out and replant them. Maybe I'll do that this fall, and plant them all the way across the front porch. Just one little row, up tight against the porch. Either that or I have to paint because it looks like crap. :D
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Here are a couple songs to go with the flower pics. Listen to the Flower People and Springtime, both by Spinal Tap.
I have some old pics I wanted to post, and figured this thread is as good a place as any since I didn't want to start another one for them. The flowers and this both involve nature in my yard, so they do have that much in common. One night couple years ago I went out to dump some garbage and sawdust in the compost bin. There was a spider hanging there on the fence-post next to the driveway waiting for a photo op, so I obliged. You can see from the pics it's smaller than a gallon jug, and it's also smaller than the wolf spiders that are sometimes found in the woods, but still a fair size spider by city standards. It's a Spider, Man, Spider, Man, great big frieakin' Spider, Man! I reduced the pics 50% from the original 4160x2340 size.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-yTWhuK48s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2zf39ubM0k
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Here at the 34th parallel we had a false spring which caused some things to bloom prematurely. My Confederate Jasmine may no make it, sadly. But the Wisteria is ab fab.
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I joke from a car salesman on the radio this morning.
"I got SOOO excited about Spring, I wet my PLANTS".
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Looking good, Alf. A couple days ago I noticed there were some crocuses blooming among the Star of Bethlehem leaves in the back yard so I took a couple of pics today. The weather has been too rainy and cloudy, but the rain and cool temps are good for the grass. I don't know if I'm going to get a good bunch of crocuses this year or not. I keep thinking they were growing in the front yard near the grape hyacinths every year. I'd like to have a good bunch of grape hyacinths to take a picture of before I mow them down, but so far they aren't even growing. Maybe leaves like the other plants, but I didn't look that close.
P.S. They look so sad and lonely. And beat down.
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I have one daffodil that was doing really well today. I took some pics as the wind was whipping it around. I really should didg up all the bulbs an separate it from the tulip it's with. The fat tulip leaves with the daffodil that has narrow leaves is one of the things that confused me and took me so long to figure out what kind of flower it was. I have a bunch of wild violets in my yard. That would give some homeowners fits, but i don't care. It's better than bare ground, and I don't mind having some flowers to go along with the greenery.
In the back yard where the crocus was struggling last week, there's not a trace of it. Just lots of Star of Bethlehem plants. I can recognize the plants as soon as I walk into the yard because of how dark green they are, whereas the grass among it looks like crap. The dark soil, etc. at the top of the pic is from when I cleaned up the grass growing in the cracks of the driveway in the fall and piled some nice dark soil next to my shed. This is the north side of the shed and gets VERY little sun, even less than you'd think. The weeds and bushes and crap on the fence at the back of the yard blocks a lot of the morning sun, and the back yard is in the shadow of the house in the afternoon. I turned to the left, zoomed in x2 and took another pic. There were more Star of Bethlehem plants, and I see one Crocus in the picture.
Next to where I was standing is where my dog is buried. The lawn is pretty healthy where he is. He's a good boy. Even after he died he was good for fertilizer.
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If it doesn't rain tomorrow, I need to mow my lawn, whether any of the flowers I've been looking for pop up or not. First I have to pick up a lot of my neighbors' trash. I don't want to mow all the trash and blow it around. Spring has sprung, for sure, no doubt about it now. It got up to at least 79 degrees today, maybe in the 80s before I crawled out of bed early this evening. Thankfully, at the parallel 43° north where I am, I know that it's only possible to get just so hot. There is a limit to it, and as bad as it gets, I know it could be worse if I lived farther south. By the way, at this latitude the sun is visible for 15 hours, 22 minutes during the summer solstice and 9 hours, 0 minutes during the winter solstice.
I knew it was warming up outside yesterday because it was warming up inside - the butter that was setting out at room temperature for a couple of weeks suddenly softened up. I thought to myself several times over the last year or two, should room temperature butter really be that hard? I thought about asking you guys, but I guess it depends on the temperature of the room. At 75 degrees it's soft, but at a temperature where I feel comfortable, it's solid and I need to scrape off bits of butter.
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I'm very cold adverse. If it's cold enough that butter stays firm it's way too cold for me. Thanks to USAF, ChanuteAFB and the Artic Circle for that conditioning.
Sadly we had to take down 25' wall of Confederate Jasmine yesterday that succumbed to the early-spring-sub-freezing cycle we had. It was so pretty and smelled so good when it bloomed. Plus gave us privacy from the street view. I've also been told by a woke neighbor not to call it CONFEDERATE JASMINE. Evidently those who control these things have another name for it now. <LONG SIGH>
I'm going to redo the puppy fencing, then probably plant Clematis.
Here is the wall in all it's neeked, glory.
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So sad. All those "woke" people need to "unwoke" and F*** OFF!
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I got some good pics of the daffodil on the north side of the steps Saturday. It took longer to bloom than the one in the open, well to the south, and a bit further west. This one is tucked into a shadow until afternoon. You can see big fat tulip leaves next to it too. We may have dropped a tulip bulb in the same hole as the daffodils when we planted them, but I don't remember doing that. I took another pic of the grape hyacinth, and one of the tulips halfway in bloom on the south side of the steps. The grape hyacinth, Muscari, should be darker purple later in spring if I don't mow it down. Here's a good picture and an illustration from Wikipedia. The clusters of flowers look like upside down bunches of grapes when they're fully in bloom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscari
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Sunday I took a couple more pics of the grape hyacinth. Not that it's worth looking at again, but I figured it didn't have much time left for this world. I think it's just a bulb that I can dig up and transplant. If so, it should be dormant in the fall. We had at least a few days in a row last week where it was in the 80s, or near 80. Then when I took out my trash, at 2:15 this morning there was snow on my car! What the shit?
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Well, guess who finally got some color today? They're a lot more colorful than 2 days ago. Now they look more like the grapes in their common name. I can mow them down and have pictures to look at, and now they won't be crappy pictures. :) Actually, I hardly ever look at my flowers except to take pictures. I ignore my them most of the time, but I do take time to stop and smell the roses. They're so darned good! And I'll have plenty of lilies, as usual when their time rolls around.
P.S. These flowers grow halfway between the front porch and sidewalk, and driveway and sidewalk up to the porch. All by themselves, right in the middle of that half of the yard. The half of the yard on the other side of the sidewalk to the porch is just grass, and no flowers. Well, not just grass. Grass and weeds.
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I'm very cold adverse. If it's cold enough that butter stays firm it's way too cold for me. Thanks to USAF, ChanuteAFB and the Artic Circle for that conditioning.
Sadly we had to take down 25' wall of Confederate Jasmine yesterday that succumbed to the early-spring-sub-freezing cycle we had. It was so pretty and smelled so good when it bloomed. Plus gave us privacy from the street view. I've also been told by a woke neighbor not to call it CONFEDERATE JASMINE. Evidently those who control these things have another name for it now. <LONG SIGH>
I'm going to redo the puppy fencing, then probably plant Clematis.
Here is the wall in all it's neeked, glory.
It took me a long time to realize that room temp in the kitchen was less than in the living room where the thermostat is. I only have the vents open to heat 2 out of 8 rooms in the whole house. One room doesn't even have a heat duct, just a square hole in the floor upstairs for the heat from downstairs to go through the ceiling. The farmhouse my dad grew up in had a hole like that in the upstairs hallway, and a wood stove downstairs to heat the whole two-story house. Even with (maybe) 14 quilts on the bed it was too cold in the winter. My bathrooms get enough heat through the closed slats of the vents. It may have been 65 degrees in the kitchen, and possibly even lower, but since I don't live in the kitchen I didn't notice if it felt cold. But when it got too hot, the whole house was hot and I ran both of my window air conditioners. One is in the bedroom, and the other is in the living room next to the open doorway with a box fan in front of it aimed right at me in the dining room.
Now I'm reading that closing vents in rooms you don't use is a bad idea. It costs more in heating costs, plus it can screw up your HVAC system.
Anyway, Alf, my kitchen was too cold for you, until the whole house was too darned hot.
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Pretty flowers. Azaleas and Pinases (sp) are really blooming now.
My parents and I lived for a while in an open, studio like, house. The bathroom was the only separate room. Eveyrthing centered around a kerosene stove in the middle of the space. A short center wall separated the kitchen from the living room and a small bedroom space had 3 wall but was open towards the center of the house. I remember my dad filling the stove's tank from a Jerry can and that we had an portable electric heater in the bathroom.
Advice on whether to open or close vents assumes the HVAC was designed and installed properly. Mine has too few sq feet of return vent(s). Blocking off an unused room actually helps, or so one technician told me. Just recently had all the insulation in the attic replaced. Made a huge difference.
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The flowers turned out okay in the last set of pics, but he daffodils really looked good to me. I should send the pics to my friend and his wife and say, look what I got. The tulips are trying to bloom, and the lilies will be the last of the bulbs to bloom. After the flowers are done for the year I usually mow them down but the lily leaves keep growing. I should let them be until the leaves die. My "June roses" will probably bloom the last week of May again instead of June, since the weather has trended warmer for several years.
I put a thick attic blanket in a long time ago, the pink stuff that looks like cotton candy but is no good to eat, :) and was advised by a home energy analyst years later to put another roll over top of it. But I didn't. I don't feel lucky about guessing where to step when I can't see the edge of the 2xs under the insulation. And they don't all run the same direction, so when you get halfway across chaos ensues. I could have laid boards on top of one layer of insulation to put in the next layer, but that sounds too much like work. My house leaks heat and air all over the place, and the attic seems to the only place that's insulated. I think the walls had something like Vermiculite or cellulose in them that settled down to practically nothing. When I replaced a light switch, I didn't see anything behind the receptacle except the outer wall of the house. Ever since I moved in, the more things I look at, the more I see that needs to be fixed. Things that are seriously wrong. NOTHING in this house is plumb, straight, square, level, or parallel to anything else. They sure don't built them like they used to. A lot of stuff should be torn out and redone, but if the house was gutted, all the problems in the frame would show, and I can already tell there's work that needs to be done there too. If it was an area anyone wanted to build a new house this ~95 year old POS would need to be demolished. And the site of this unholy mess blessed before anything else is built.
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I took a couple pics pf the tulips Wednesday. They're looking good and healthy. I didn't even notice the dandelion there or I would have decapitated it. I finally mowed the front yard, twice with the mower at different heights to mulch the long grass, and it looks good. Good for this area anyway. And I mowed around the grape hyacinths. They look more purple with my Oakleys on, so I think they're distorting the color. I wore Ray-Ban Aviators with G-15 lenses (neutral Gray color, 15% visible light transmission) for so many years, I got used to my sunglasses not distorting colors, just making them darker. I should put those on then compare the color difference with the Oakleys.
I'm supposedly mostly color blind according to one type of test, but if this is what color blind looks like, I wouldn't want to see in full color. It would be like everything in the world was covered in fluorescent paint, and I was walking around with a blacklight.
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ROSES! My June roses, whatever kind of roses they are, usually bloom around the first week of June. This is the first week of June, and they bloomed this week, Monday or Tuesday. It was still May, but the last week of May is the first week of June too, so they were right on schedule. They used to bloom around the second week of June 20-30 years ago, the first week of June 10-20 years ago, and sometimes the last week of May in recent years. I think it's getting just a bit warmer, a little bit earlier, but I like it. I went a couple of weeks without having to run the furnace or air conditioner day or night. I didn't even need to turn a fan on for a long time, but I need it now. I love living up here in the temperate zone. You guys down south can keep the sub-tropics and swamp ass summers all to yourself. :)
1. From straight in front.
2. From the driveway next door.
3. Quarter view from driveway.
4. View from porch, camera held high.
5. Quarter view next to porch.
They're off to a good start, huh?
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They look nice.
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Thanks. I just wish there was a way to transmit a smell facsimile, a smax, if you will. I still say they're the best roses I ever smelled. Better than perfume. The best part, besides the wonderful aroma is, once they're established, they take just about zero maintenance. I dusted them for aphids once since August, 1991, and basically ignored them the rest of the time, even when we had extended dry spells. Sometimes I cut them back in the fall, 3 feet high or so, knee high, and many times not all. No matter what, I can count on having bunches of roses in June. When I went out to check the mail Saturday I had my nose buried in blossoms. As I quite literally took time to smell the roses, someone parked on the street 2 doors down said something about how good they looked. I have no idea who they were, but told them the same thing I tell everyone, if they want some, come on over and cut them off. I misplaced my pruning shears, so I can't cut a lot of roses off, but if I do, the more I cut, the more it forces it to bloom elsewhere.
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On the "to do" list is to put in a rose garden. It may never happen but it's on the list.
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I beg your pardon... Did you promise someone a rose garden? If I dug one up and mailed it to you in the fall, it would probably grow. All I would need to do is knock most of the dirt off, but not wash it off, and you would need to dig a hole 1' wide and 1' deep to put it in. Add some halfway decent soil and water for a couple weeks and it should be good. A woman at work drove around all day with a rosebush on her towmoter in a milk jug with wet newspaper wrapped around the roots and it thrived. And I think that was in the summer when it shouldn't have been transplanted. I barely survived in the shop environment. My rosebush is like the honey badger, it doesn't give a s**t.
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My lilies started blooming this week and my roses are completely done dropping all their petals. I only took a couple pictures but will take more to show more flowers, maybe when I go out to mow today.
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My "June roses" bloomed 2 weeks early this year. They were fully open May 18th, and maybe a day or two before that. After blooming in June for nearly 30 years, they went from opening up in mid-June, to the first week of June, to the last week of May a few years ago, and now around the middle of May. It's getting warmer earlier in the year. Here's what they looked like on the 23rd, before I cut dozens of flowers off and several kids in the neighborhood took them home in grocery bags. There are flowers behind flowers behind flowers, so there are a lot more than what you see at first. I like to stick my nose right in them whenever I check the mail or go in the front yard for any other reason, literally taking time to smellthe roses. There was one particularly good one yesterday that I wish I could post the smell of online. It was incredible. These are already the best smelling roses I've ever smelled in my life, and that one... wow! Amazing.
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I'd forgotten about this thread.
The Clematus are doing well though not covering the whole fence in place of the Confederate Jasmine.
Here's a picture of a stand alone planting, not on the fence. Looking pretty good.
Now that the Cherokee Rose is no longer Georgia's state flower, I want some. Having a hard time finding them though.
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Looking good, Alf. My ex's grandmother had clematis growing on a chain-link fence between her house to the garage. I think that was the first time I ever saw them. I don't know if there's anything left at my mom's house, but last year part of my good smelling rose bush was still growing in her yard, by the back of the garage. I have other roses from one of my ex's step-father's places up north growing along the fence in my back yard but they're nothing special. My daffodils and tulips have come and gone and I'm still waiting for the lilies.
My mom had a bunch of lupines along the back fence that may still be there. And the front yard had various roses, and a bunch of deep red peonies the ants would crawl on and help open, but they may be gone. A long time ago she had carnations, then lavender in the front yard next to the driveway, and poppies in the front and back. I liked picking a lavender leaf, and crushing the fresh leaf under my nose while rolling it between my finger and thumb. Ahh. Good stuff. It almost made me want to make homemade soap out of it. I remember one time my mom had Jerusalem artichokes growing in the back yard next to the house. She sliced up the tubers and cooked them like water chestnuts in "Chinese food". One time she had a sunflower taller than the garage with a full-grown fox squirrel sitting on top of it eating the seeds. The things you see when you don't have your shotgun. ;) She had forsythia bushes growing all along one side of the back yard when I was a kid but those are long gone. I remember crawling around in the space between the fence and bushes, and they were drying out and breaking off. She had a lot of different flowers and stuff in the yard, not counting the garden which was on the other side of the driveway. My mom and dad had 2 city lots with a double width driveway in the middle, and the entire east lot was the garden. The house and yards sat on the west lot.
The blue spruce I planted in 4th grade is still in the corner of the garden and after 50+ years it's pretty big. It was probably Arbor Day when I brought home a seeding about a foot tall and stuck it in the ground. My younger brother's tree died, and my older brother's tree in the front yard turned out to be some kind of pine tree. It must be 5 years older than mine, but was shorter the last time I looked at them both. I fed mine carp out of the Flint River a couple of times. I'm not sure if it liked that or not, but it's still here and doing well.
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Last week I noticed a bunch of daylilies in the back yard were blooming. When I looked at the ones in the front yard they were in bloom too. I took some pics of them this afternoon. The ones in the back yard are surrounded by roses. Me and my ex planted roses from one of her step-father's houses up north in Glennie, MI by the 6' chain link fence, all the way across the back yard. Besides the "Glennie roses", there are some of my "June roses" from the front yard planted back there too. On the other side of the fence are catnip, deadly nightshade, various other weeds, “trash trees”, and long vines that climb all over the fence and trees. Nothing a napalm bomb couldn't improve. It's all poison and junk that I'm allergic too. Anytime I clear out branches and vines coming through the fence, I have to take a couple Benadryl. It looked better Friday when some roses were blooming in between the daylilies.