What pretty green sticks.

First things first! WOOT WOOT 100 followers! ROCKIN!

Hello ALL! Today I am taking care of my herbs. So to start things off, I would like you go to guess what kind of an herb this is.

 If you said it looks dead and cant be an herb you are close, but If you said basil then you would be 100% correct.  This is in fact a basil plant, broad leaf basil to be more precise.

Now , if you are wondering why it looks like a stringy lifeless bunch of twigs, then your wonderings will lead you to my answer. That answer would be SNAILS! That is right, those gross things that come out when it rains and go crunch squish when you step on them.                          

Snails, the bane of my basil! Now how to get rid of them.

I decided to use the product that has worked wonders for me in the past. The tiny little white rabbit poop looking things. They are made of some kind of biodegradable breakdown in the rain material, with the active ingredient being Some kind of iron. So that means it will help my orange tree too! (if you have been reading for a while you will know my orange tree has a problem with a lack of iron ) 

The magical product I have been touting for this whole time is Sluggo. It is OMRI certified which means it natural and stuff, and it can be used around my dogs!
I will update you some time soon when or if I see positive ore negative results from this.














OK! thanks for reading guys! come back soon for an update on my sunflower seeds or possibly the basil!

What is Chlorosis?

 Hello Again, and welcome to another adventure in my garden!
Today I would like to show you how my Navel Orange Tree is doing!
As you can see it's nice and green and it seems to have recovered from the bout of chlorosis it was suffering from. Chlorsis is a condition in plants where the iron in the solid is either not available or not existent so the plant cannot form the healthy green color, and will drop many leaves. Fixing that last time was simple, just add some iron in the from of Ironite and get the Ph of the soil around 6.0 and it perked right up! But now I have run into another snag!

 That's right! I have another problem with my orange tree! Once again It seems to be being attacked by some unknown force making it's leaves turn from the desirable dark green to a unhappy yellow orange color.

I am pretty sure this is just another kind of chlorsis, which saddens me because that means there is something in the solid that the roots keep tapping into and its causing this. I will probably have to remove the tree from the pot , and change out a very large portion of the soil for new solid.

I have already gone through twice the reccomended dose of Ironite, which should solve this problem, but it keeps coming back. So more drastic measures are to come.

I will document just how I go about fixing my fancy little tree in the future, but for now I will fertilize it with my pooch Kun Kun!

Aint he just so cute! Ok guys! come back soon and I'll reveal how I plan on fixing this tree and maybe have a Sunflower update!

Navel Orange Tree update!

Here is my orange tree again! I got this little fellow last year about this time. So I have had this fancy little tree for just about a year now, and I have documented most of the things that have gone wrong with it. It has had a lack of iron/zinc resulting in yellowing leaves, and then the support bamboo pole snaped so it had to support itself. Well now we have another probem! I found HOLES in a few of the leaves! What a terrible sight!

As you can see it looks like something chewed its way through this leaf.

Really this is not that bad. The leaf itself will survive and the tree as a whole will not suffer.

I put the better picture up on top, these are kinda fuzzy and focusing on the pot below. But you can still get different angles, which are nice.

My guess as to what made these holes is that it's one of a few different insects. My first guess is a Carpenter Bee. These guys are great, and do not harm your plants very much. Actually they do more good then bad because they pollinate even during light rain. My second guess is a bird, for it's nest or something, then the third is a caterpillar, but because I did not see any such thing on my tree I think I'm safe... for now!

The thing that makes me most happy is that I might actually get a couple pieces of fruit off this fancy little tree this year! Above right picture is three of about 15 oranges that seem as though they may develop into full on oranges!

The pictures above you can see the leaves are almost fully recovered from that little bout with the coffee I applied. and the leaves are mostly only yellow towards the tips of the tree. It's still in recovery, but well on its way to becoming full on healthy! Next week I will add some Fruit Tree Fertilizer.

Thanks for reading everybody! Come back next time to see how my fancy orange tree is doing!

I'm sure you are all well aware that the only "gardening" I do at home is with my single tree. It is held up in a 15 gallon plastic pot in potting soil. I try to take good care of my fancy little Navel Orange tree. Bu as things go I went a little overboard and added some stuff to the soil that I should not have. (mainly coffee grounds, the ph of coffee is anywhere from 5.9-6.2 MOST citrus like about 6.5-6.8 ph) This lowered the soil PH to a point that rendered the iron in the soil to be inaccessible to my favorite little tree. Thus it could not produce the needed chloroplast to produce healthy GREEN leaves. In a previous blog I showed pictures of what the leaves looked like when I first started to try and fix the problem. to compare those pictures click Orange Tree Trouble 1   .

My tree is doing much better then before. The leaves are getting darker, and it's even putting out flowers, which with any luck will turn into my first years orange crop! click the link to my other blog post to compare the leaves from 1.5 weeks ago to now.

All I did was run water through the soil for a good 2 hours. This washed the soil and leached out all the extra coffee and anything else that might have been effecting my tree. THEN as an extra precaution I added some Liquinox

This Stuff is liquid Iron/Zinc . It's in a form that is easily accessible to plant, and tastes great!(not for human consumption) . All you do is pour 4 TBS into 1 GAL of water, and pour onto the soil which contains your plant. then water in thoroughly.

So, tune in next time to see the update on either my tree, or how the full on garden at my sisters house is doing.

As Always, Thx for the readz guys!