Saturday Gardening, Puttering and Outdoor Adventure Thread

Tips for Valentines Day

Valentines Day comes right after next weekend. It pays to be prepared:

Forget the dozen roses that will be faded and wilted in days. Instead, thrill your gardening Valentine with one or a dozen red, pink, or white blooming flowers and shrubs. For this romantic holiday, give flowers that will bloom throughout the summer -- or even for years to come.

If plants are in short supply, consider ordering a bouquet of seed packets for colorful flowers. For Valentine colors, choose cosmos, hollyhock, Jupiter's beard, larkspur, zinnia, and whirling butterfly. With a bit of planning, perhaps you can place an order for Lady Jane tulip bulbs.

Your choices could include packets of seeds, small plants, or even a gift certificate for a spring gardening shopping spree. Choose your blooms from these desert-garden-friendly annuals, perennials, shrubs, and bulbs. . .

Some nice recommendations for New Mexico and beyond are included.

Here's a thought for people who are sheltering in place, away from the garden and others. Perhaps this is not the best way to combine puttering and romance:

The most sacrosanct thread at AoSHQ?

I learned from a comment last week that this is the most sacrosanct thread at AoSHQ. The original Valentine was a saint, so I thought that we might discuss this sainthood and sanctity thing as we approach Valentine's Day. I didn't think the first definition quite fit this thread. Here's the second:

Sacrosanct

2. treated as if holy : immune from criticism or violation

Synonyms:

hallowed, holy, inviolable, sacred, unassailable, untouchable

Did you know?

That which is sacrosanct is doubly sacred. Sacrosanct is derived from the Latin sacrosanctus, which is probably from the phrase sacro sanctus ("hallowed by a sacred rite"). The first element of this phrase, sacro, is the ablative case of sacrum ("a sacred rite") and means "by a sacred rite" (sacrum lives on in English anatomy as the name for our pelvic vertebrae--a shortening of os sacrum, which literally means "holy bone"). The second element, sanctus, is the past participle of the Latin sancire, which means "to make sacred." Sanctus has also given English the words saint, sanctimony, sanctify, and sanctuary.

So, is it true? Is this the most sacrosanct thread at AoSHQ? And what does that mean?

Outdoor Adventure

A friend of mine was in a group of 9 middle school girls who called themselves the "Friday Night Gang" because they got together for Friday night activities. It helped that their parents trusted them. They kept in touch all the way until they were near or into retirement age, and last October the 6 who were still close enough to travel met for a sleepover and a trip to Zion National Park. Here are some photos from their visit:

A natural seep:

Time for a little puttering:

What they saw on a hike:

What some of those symbols meant:

There is not room today for photos from the drive two of them took home to Arizona.

Advice from an Old Farmer

h/t an esteemed delivery boy at Signature Magazine.

Most of the stuff people worry about, ain't never gonna happen anyway.

Gardens of The Horde

badgerwx sent us some photos at the end of January. Brrrrr. . . :

Not much to show outside while I'm in the deep freeze. But once it warms up enough for some outside puttering, I'll have to remove this unlucky arbor vitae. It seems AVs don't like to be crowded by structures or other plants. This one had all the branches on the back side die back over the years & the sudden weight of 8" of snow on just one side was too much for the root ball. I got the snow in just a couple of hours in early Jan & it went over before I could broom it off.

Nature always wins in the end. I'm going to replace it with a non-evergreen native shrub with flowers for the pollinators - maybe a dwarf buttonbush (Cephalanthus).

I had an unwelcome visitor hanging around my bird feeder yesterday.

A friend with a bird ID app says it's a red-shouldered hawk. This picture is a little blurry because I zoomed in on it thru my glass patio door & porch screen.

And here is some indoor color. This is 1 of 2 descendants of a holiday cactus I inherited from my Mom (not found in stores!). This one started blooming the 2nd week in Jan & just finished a few days ago - the buds open 1 or 2 at a time. #2 still has about a half dozen buds that should see me thru the 1st half of Feb.

Such welcome color this time of year!

If you would like to send information and/or photos for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:

ktinthegarden
at that g mail dot com place

Include the nic by which you wish to be known when you comment at AoSHQ,
unless you want to remain a lurker.

posted by K.T. at 01:15 PM

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