Time to get started

The holidays are over and our decorations have been packed away.  Although I've yet to make up my 2024 "to-do" list, I thought it was time to at least fill in the empty spot in my street side garden.  After all it's been bare since the dead Auranticarpa rhombifolium at the south end was removed in late September.

This is a recent shot of the street-side succulent bed.  I thought I had a closeup photo of the empty space in front of the lath house but, if I took one, I can't find it.  As it stands, even as I worked to fill the spot formerly occupied by the tree-sized shrub, I'm concerned that the remaining Auranticarpa on the far right is now also in decline.

Instead of adding new plants, I ended up moving others that were already there.  Someone (not me!) had stepped on the small Agave colorata I'd originally planned to move there and I decided it wasn't worth saving.  However, an Agave americana 'Mediopicta Alba' I'd planted two years ago as a pup deserved more room so I decided to give it pride of place and fill in around the edges.

The mid-sized 'Mediopicta Alba' had already produced 2 pups of its own so I moved the larger of the 2 as well.  The 2 Agave 'Blue Flame' pups on the left will quickly fill the area between them.

I also planted 2 small cuttings of Echium handiense 'Pride of Fuerteventura' and 3 cuttings of Graptoveria 'Fred Ives' behind the 'Mediopicta Alba'.  Unfortunately, at present they're barely visible in the larger photo.

As I tidied up the area in the process of making these changes, I generated succulent cuttings.

There's not enough here to warrant a giveaway yet but I'm willing to bet I'll have more within another couple of weeks

I spent a little time beheading the overgrown Graptoveria 'Fred Ives' in another area but I've yet to finish replanting those cuttings.

As soon as the cuttings callus over, most will go back into the area they came from.  A few of these may go into the street-side bed.

I've also started cutting back the bush violets (Barleria obtusa) that are quickly dropping their ripe seeds.  My largest clumps of these plants have been spreading not only by self-seeding but also by layering, where stems running along the ground root.  So, in addition to cutting the plants back to the ground, I need to reduce some of the clumps to a more manageable size.

I want to remove about one-third of this plant before the new growth develops much further.  The plant should rebound within 2-3 months.

My efforts to control the gophers, described in an earlier post, aren't going well.  Supposedly, these are solitary animals that maintain territories of about an acre in size but, if that's true, the animals have gerrymandered their territories because their mounds are popping up in widely different areas of our half-acre lot.

A fresh gopher's mound that appeared just outside my lath house on New Year's Day is shown on the left.  I poured deterrent granules down the hole, stomped the soil back into place, scattered more granules on top and watered it in (shown right).

Yesterday, more tunnels appeared directly adjacent to the lath house, in the street-side bed next to an Aloe lukeana, and in 2 new spots in back garden.  (All these photos were taken after I stomped the soil back in place.)  I'd tried to channel the gophers eastward toward the back slope but the uncooperative critters are moving west instead.

I'll end this post on a more positive note with a few pretty pictures of recent blooms.

Aloe 'Moonglow'

Lachenalia viridiflora was beaten down by earlier rainstorms but I had to share the fabulous turquoise color of those flowers

I'll be back on Friday with my quarterly wide-shots post, which should provide a good springboard for planning future garden projects.

All material © 2012-2024 by Kris Peterson for Late to the Garden Party