Cactus Corner!

 

Bonjour!

Here's the post on Cactus Corner I promised you the other day. As mentioned, a few weekends ago my mom and I decided to plant a lot of our big cactus and succulent plants, in the ground, especially the cuttings we got from family friends that we know grow into monsters! So, we scouted the backyard and found the perfect sunny spot to fill with cacti and succulents, I've dubbed it Cactus Corner! Please keep in mind that it's still a work in progress, little by little we've been sourcing out new plants to fill it in. Once we've accomplished filling the space we'll install a nice new stone border and dump a few bags of sand colored rocks over the surface of the soil to make it look nice and uniform. Until then we'll leave it like this and add new cacti and succulents as we find them.

The reason why we chose the back corner of the house near the pool is because it gets lots of sun and it was already home to two HUGE Aloe plants that my mom planted a few years back along with lots of Purple Hearts. The contrast of the green Aloe with the purple Purple Hearts is awesome, so we knew we wanted to repeat that some more... Also, the Aloe had gotten big and juicy and since it flanked the right edge of two palm trees, we decided to repeat that by planting some more Aloes around the remaining perimeter of them, that way once the newer Aloe's get bigger they will create a ring around the palm tree. After that we started adding different Cacti, Kalachoes, Echeverias, Agave and more interspersed with more Purple Hearts and Oyster Plants for more of that beautiful royal purple contrast!

Once again, it's a work in progress and some of these pictures were taken in the afternoon, hence the less than stellar lighting. That's about it for now, more to come as this space evolves. Enjoy!

The gorgeous stalks on my mother's giant juicy Aloes...

Here's the general area (still looking too bare, needs more plants and rocks for ground cover)... On the other side of the palms are the large Aloes and newly planted soon-to-be-monsters cacti plants...

This is called a Rainbow Aloe!
(which my dog mangled shortly after taking this photo! *sigh*)

Check out the scraggly Echeveria in the foreground, my dog trampled and broke many of its delicate leaves :( To the left is an Aloe and in the background is an Oyster plant, Kalanchoes and Purple Hearts....



Check out this Aloe below right when we planted it...

And then a week or two after planting.... A flower stalk sprouted and grew SUPER fast....
YIPEEEEE!

Well, above is what this little Prickly Pear Cactus looked like BEFORE my kind Cocker Spaniel Chewby Doo trampled it and ripped off the skinny little son it worked so hard to spawn! I've had this cactus since last year when I lived downtown, it took so long for it to show signs of growth and go figure, right when I decide to plant it in the ground my dog destroys it. It's mean, but I'm sure he got at least a few prickly spines stuck in his paws as punishment, HA, that'll teach him! But sadly, it doesn't teach him, he keeps trampling everything in Cactus Corner, lord only knows how many times he does it when I'm not around to see scold! Oh well... My mom and I are working on a solution to this problem. We are contemplating a raised bed, but we're not sure yet - more details on that once we decide. But there's good news... This resilient little guy bounced back in the week or so since his child was decapitated! LOOK! He has grown a new baby... Cross your fingers that this one will survive King Kong Chewby!

Here are a couple shots of the Purple Hearts... I really like them, their color is so vibrant and I'm totally in love with the little lavender flowers they sprout from their tips, which I didn't notice until recently! Plus, they're super cheap, grow and spread fast with little maintenance and they make for such incredible contrast against the green of any garden!

And this amazingly colorful Kalanchoe is called a Butterfly Kalanchoe and I found it at Home Depot last weekend! It;s exactly like the Kalanchoe succulent that I found growing by the side of the road last year, seen in this post, except its colors are green and hot pink, as opposed to green and purple! It's fantastic, I can't wait for it to grow like wildfire all throughout Cactus Corner, it will create gorgeous color and contrast against all the green and especially against the purple of the Oyster plants!

For comparison, here is the purple and green Kalancho Serrata (a.k.a. Magic Tower) growing nearby. I love its little knife-like leaf edges, and whenever I see they've sprouted those little balls/babies at the tips (you can only see one growing on the top right leaf's tip) I gently pull them off and throw them around so they can sprout new plants, yup, it's THAT easy to propagate! They grow FAST!

Ok, now let's head around the corner to where the big boys will be... We pass the huge Aloes on the corner that my mother planted many year ago...

Here are the Aloes again, this picture was obviously taken days after the ones at the top of the post because the yellow flowers opened! And just past the Aloes are these guys.... I'm pretty sure we planted them too close, now that I look at it once they get big there won't be much space for each to grow so I'll have to move them around this weekend.... There's a crazy spiky Agave of some sort in the foreground and a very prickly cactus on the back left and two other cacti on the right that get monstrously huge! Take a close look at the taller cactus in the back right of the picture because it has changed SO MUCH since we planted it in the ground a few weekends ago. Want proof? Well just scroll on down to the next photo! It's truly incredible!!

In just a week or two since planting this sprouts....Would you look at this?? WOW!

See!?!?! It has sprouted an ENORMOUS stem and flower bud, it's so big that it's starting to sag away from the cactus! I sure hope my dog doesn't break it off during a crazed lizard hunt! I can't wait for it to open! Yipeeee...

Last but not least, a closeup of the viciously spiked Agave...


(All images in this post are my own personal photographs, please ask permission before using them and link back to Inspire Bohemia. Thank you!)

Garden Update!

Garden Update! 

I wish I could call this an April garden update, however I will admit I am a week or two late in finalizing this post.  I am taking new pictures of my garden and planters this coming weekend, so I plan to have another garden update that features all of my other plants not shown in this post very soon.

Spring is in full swing and my garden (situated within my mother's equally transforming garden oasis - a post on that soon)  has changed so much over the past few months! Plants that looked sad are now looking like a million bucks! Flowers are blooming, news leaves growing and everything is all-around AMAZING!  Let's just say apart from my mom and I, the butterflies and birds are beside themselves with happiness!  Hee-hee! :)

It's been warming up here in Miami so my plants are definitely getting lots of sun, however it has also been raining the past few days which has given them some much needed refreshment!  All this gorgeous weather means I've spent my last four weekends by our pool - so guess what? I'm no longer ghost white, yay... But, I am littered with a billion more freckles, oh well... it's that Irish blood in me!  Anyway, I've managed to avoid burning and peeling for four weekends straight (and believe me that is a difficult feat), it seems the secret is to get a little bit of sun at a time - like mama always told me!  Anyway, I am quite proud of that accomplishment, we'll call it the vanishing ghost shall we? The ghost is me... because now I'm closer to a caramel tan color, yay!  I'm still not done, so Saturday sun here I come!

What else? Today my mom and I weren't too hungry on our lunch breaks so we decided to try out this new place near our jobs called Yogurtland! WOW! Talk about awesomeness! So many delicious flavors!! Dutch Chocolate, Peanut Butter, Pistachio, Guava Pineapple Tart, Red Velvet Cake, Mango, Coconut, Honey Comb... just to name a few! We LOVED it! Hey, now we know where to skip out on a fattening lunch and have some zero-grams-of-fat/less-than-100-calories yummy frozen yogurt instead!  So if you've got a Yogurtland near you and have yet to try it out, you should!  They charge by the ounce (33 cents/oz.), so you can fill a cup as little or as much as you want.  I like that they charge by the ounce because then you aren't forced to pay for a size that you may or may not eat all of, you can choose how much you want to serve yourself because it's self serve!  There are lots of flavors and toppings, including candy, fruit and nuts, but believe me - that frozen yogurt is so yummy you don't need garnishments!  Yum!

Ok, enough about that, now for the garden update! Enjoy!



First off, here's the gang by the pool, the Pencil Cactus is trying to steal the show...

One of my newest succulents, fuzzy Echeveria Doris Taylor...




Her lovely delicate flowers stalks went from this....

To this...

They're either taking a really long time to fully open, or this is as good as it gets...we'll see!




New purple planter...







I love this little guy.... little Echeveria is his name, haha...





Remember this planter?....

Well check out the precious little white flowers that have sprouted from the tip of the pink and green succulent (forgot its name)....





Then there's this old gal... she's a little over a year old now and by far, one of my favorites. This is an Echeveria Glauca or Imbricata, I'm still unsure which. Anyway, as you can see she has spawned several babies, all at various points of growth, from her stem. Pure beauty!


Check out a few different angles featuring her sexy pink tips, up close and personal.... lovely...








These are all the babies growing in the planter at the base of the giant Pencil Cactus shown at the beginning of the post....




A funky type of Jade plant, looks like tubular coral to me!...


This is another new planter that I made a few weekends ago with a terracotta planter bowl....


Just a day or two after I planted it, one of the succulents sprouted tons of these beautiful little pink and green bell flowers.... GORGEOUS!

AND THEN.... a few days after those bell flowers appeared, this yellow flower opened on the other succulent! Wheeee!!! And a day after that, a second yellow flower! I didn't get a picture of both though...


Here's the other succulent I planted in there, a fuzzy one with a velvetesque texture! I forgot the name...

More pictures of the pink bells, because they are just so darn precious! Oh, and I love this photo below, I took it while laying on the ground to get a funky angle....


(All images are my own personal photographs. Please ask permission before using any of them and please link back to Inspire Bohemia, thank you!)