Choice Morsels

I was out picking up pine cones this cold sunny day. I use a grabber stick to pick them up, the kind you can buy in a handicapped aid section. We have a couple, since we used to use them for picking up aluminum cans when we had someplace to sell the aluminum per pound. Now I just use it on pine cones and plop them in a mop bucket carry. Figure the bucket holds a minimum of 20 and I filled and emptied it 8 times, that's 160 cones.  Did I say I have a lot of pine cones in my yard? Today's Garden Pictures include my indoor flowers on my indoor Snake Plant and my new birdhouse I just hung outside the other day! First, a close-up of my Snake Plant bloom: It sits outside all summer, then blooms this time of year every year. This year it's got 4 bloom stalks up! Notice the tiny clear droplets? I didn't realize it had those until I took this close-up. They look like water droplets, but I touched one--it's a tiny dewdrop of sap. Next: My New Bird House!...

Greetings! Another fine Wednesday for gardening here in the south! One of the good things about flowers and plants is if you don't like where they are, they can be moved. We've decided the Cedar tree out front isn't looking healthy and it's too big to decorate for Christmas anymore. (A big section on one side is brown and dead looking--why I don't know. Either too much sun or some type of fungus.) However, it's not so big we can't cut it down with a simple bow-saw ourselves. The stem is maybe 4 inches across. I want to replace it with one of the evergreen trees such as I see used in the landscape at our local Walmart. They're already trained into a conical Christmas tree shape and have pretty red berries. Perhaps a type of needle-less holly; I'm not sure.  I'd like to get 2: one to replace the cedar in front and one for in back where an Azalea died. Their denseness would make them attractive to birds for nesting. Today's Garden ...