Garden Pic Wedensday: My Back Yard

Today's outside task was spraying down the exterior vinyl siding with bleach/soap. Years ago I saved a Green Sweep bottle, which is a type of liquid weed & feed, because the empty bottle has a long, strong spray that's fantastic for this job. It's not quite power-spraying. I rely on the bleach and strong Florida sun to do most of the work.

 

Yesterday, I worked on mowing and edging beds. I edged the bed along the retaining wall, then moved to the back rear bed where I pulled up the black vinyl edging.
A friend helped us put that in and did so, arranging it into a tight "S" curve, which sounds like a good idea until you try to mow.
The curves are just too short for the mower to fit and finally, after years of putting up with it, I've decided to pulling up all that black edging. It's much easier to just keep the beds well mulched and edged periodically with a spade.

There's Canna's in that bed that are supposed to be along the neighbors wire fence, but Canna's tend to spread, though this year, only a handful were really out of line. I pulled up those and used them to fill in blank spaces along the fence. They also got

a good dose of fertilizer and I still need to apply some insect dust on them.
There's some little pest that likes to get into their central leaf coils and eat them.

 

Today's Garden Pics:
First, a view along the retaining wall into our backyard where I was working on that back corner bed on the cannas. I've added some labels identifying various things.

That Iris there is a type of shade-loving landscape Iris with very tall leaves and blooms flatish yellow blossoms.

 

 

 

 

And another piece of "garden art" I fixed up. My neighbor, before they moved, gave me this metal sun wind chime, though it was completely rust covered. I brushed it off with a wire brush, sprayed it with some pink Rustoleum spray I had on hand, then wiped a bit of black spray on a cloth over the front to bring out the face features. It now hangs on this Aspen tree in front. I added wind chime I had that needed a place to go on the bottom of this one, so now it tingles merrily with every breeze!

 

 

And, lastly, a pic of my red/white Amaryllis and a Hot Poker lily. What's amazing is I've had this Hot Poker lily plant for at least 4 years in the ground here and this is the first time it's decided to bloom!