Mixing it up with various things.

 Nothing to report from my garden. Tiny, tiny zucchini starting but no flowers on the males as yet to collect pollen. Still haven't fixed the first zucchini, will likely do that tonight. Two #tomatoes and lots of peppers. Guess I need to make some salsa.

Itty bitty #zucchini upper right

Almost ready! A few more days!

I'm learning a lot from just three plants and applying science. Most definitely will be amending much heavier when these are done and using more muscle to work the beds deeper and wider. When I water the tomato and pepper the organic matter that was originally in there is gradually moving to the surface and puddling. I'm glad I put the sticks in to keep the water and that around the plants.

Oh and the weed/purslane bed apparently was weeded a little. Some of the grass was pulled out and also discovered a few days ago that the hose had sprung a leak. I hope it wasn't my use of the nozzle that stressed it. 

Gee did she get a hint?

Serious leak

I didn't see any evidence of more whitefly or thrips on the tomato or the lemon bush. Though that is looking seriously in need of some food which it likely won't be getting. Wish I had kept that fertilizer now.

A few more pictures from Disneyland that are worth noting as I went through them again. 

Kumquat tree

Yep, it's in a pot in the small ice cream parlor patio area. I was waiting and looked over my shoulder seeing the fruit and thought, 'could it be?'. Scratched the small orange fruit and sure enough it's a kumquat. The fruit look a little stunted as they are in the shade but I'm sure that they swap them out at some point. 

How did I know it was a kumquat other than the fruit and leaves? I discovered years ago from someone else that if you take your thumbnail and run it along the skin, don't have to scratch just mark it and then smell, you will know what kind of fruit it is and what it's going to taste like. Seriously! It is 100% accurate, specially on oranges. But don't go into the store and stand there marking up all the fruit, kind of rude really and like I said, don't scratch it seriously, just bruise it running your nail along the skin in a line.

This is a wonderful little window area in the line for Rise of the Resistance. I saw the planting from the outside but didn't know how the line went so when we came on this I had to take a picture. Again succulent/drought tolerant plantings and I couldn't stand for long due to the line moving quickly.

Not gardenia.

The flowering bush is familiar but can't remember what it is. I think it has '--onia' in the name so hang on while I try and ID it. I was sort of close, Cordia boissieri, 'Mexican olive'. Has nothing to do with olives and is not even close to being that and is actually in the borage family. I may have seen it as a young plant when I worked at the nursery. Yep and you guessed it, drought tolerant from southern Texas into Mexico.

Just so many interesting plants and not all were dry landscape but a majority of them were. One thing that was lacking for many reasons was lawn areas. Smaller places yes but very well bordered by hedges or roped off. No lounging on the grass for sure in Disneyland. The lushest area was the Jungle Cruise really and a lot of those trees and shrubs were very well established. Oh and the plantings around the Haunted Mansion where I found this wonderful tree.

'Weeping Mulberry'

Yep.. because it was Haunted Mansion, a Weeping Mulberry. The flower stalk in front of it is from a 'Bear's Breeches' botanically, Acanthus mollis. What does that have to do with macabre plantings? Acanthus is derived from the latin for 'thorny' the larger leaf variety has some thorny sepals on the flower stalk but there is also a variety that has leaves that look more like a thistle leaf.

Not at Disney but at home, noticed this wonderful specimen of Bird of Paradise, sprouting another flower from the flower.

 

All the years I worked and studied I had no clue that they could do that until I saw that at the nursery one day and it still boggled my mind. 

So that's all from the garden today. Hope to have another fresh tomato in a day or two and maybe some salad or stir fry with the #zucchini.