Whitfill Nursery Garden Hour Radio Show for Saturday for April 16th, 2011

The Whitfill Nursery Garden Hour with Brian Whitfill for Saturday April 16th, 2011

More good gardening sense from Mr. Whitfill himself on am 550 starting at 7am!

Fall color in Arizona

Thinking about a new tree for the front yard, wanting something with fall color. To get that great look of changing colors, you need to pick from deciduous trees. Further investigation proves that deciduous trees are very messy even if just once a year. I now know I will be choosing from more native evergreen trees for my front yard.

One cool thing I noticed was that even though I will not get the great fall color from a tree like a red push pistache tree, was that I DO get fall color with plants like this large pencil cactus. You should really see the fall colors we get from our fast growing grape vines!

More plants planted in the yard

Here are a few more images of some  really interesting plants we've planted this last week in our yard.

Here is the image of the cactus in our vintage milk can

Thought I'd share this image of our newly planted cactus.We've planted this tall growing cactus so as not to have anything drape down and cover the awesome embossed dairy lettering.

Potted the cactus cuttings yesterday

With the weather nice enough to back outside, I decieded to plant the cactus cuttings I've had in the garage for the last few weeks.

I found some  old plant containers and filled them with native sandy soil. I'll  leave them like this until I find a place to plant them or until I give them away.

I also planted a very cool cactus in one of our old milk cans that we have throughout our yard and garden. I think it will look really great when it blooms it's white flowers! Not to mention I'm trying to do as much as I can to attract the few bats I've seen around our area. I've read that for some reason bats like white flowers? Not sure why, but then again there is not that much information regarding bats that I can find. If you know anything on bats in the Arizona area  near Phoenix pleaselet me know.

Really interesting cactus in yard

Had to snap this photo of this awesome cactus!

Pine cone cactus cuttings have been planted

A few images of three pine cone cactus that I planted from recent cuttings. The trick to planting cacti cuttings  is to let them rest in a dark  place like your garage for a couple weeks. This lets the cactus form a callus at the cut site. Then it's as easy as sticking it in the ground and giving it a little water every now and then - native soil works best in my experience.

I planted them almost flat on the ground since this is a West facing wall. They have since straightened themselves out. I can't wait for the awesome white flowers to start blooming. If you don't know what these flowers look like just look back in my blog and you'll find some great photos of pinecone cactus flowers.

I hope to have these white cactus flowers draw in some of our local bats, since I've read that bats in our area are attracted to white flowers and these pinecone cactus flowers open at dusk into the night.

Planting some more cactus in the morning!

I plan on planting more cactus in the morning along a wall that gets a lot of sun. I plan on planting a few of what I now know are called "pinecone cactus". They are thos gray looking cactus that get a beautiful white flower. I'll post some photos after I get them in the ground to show you, however I did take a picture of one or two mixed in with other cactus cuttings a while back if you wanted to look there.

Also, I will be making a repair to a drip line that I punched a hole through while extending my citrus tree drip lines. I noticed a large river of water had made a groove into the new steer manure mulch I added last weekend, so tomorrow I will have to explore a little and find out where and how I did that. I'm thinking I poked a hole in the smaller drip line while trying to install the drip line stakes I needed to keep the emitters at the right place without ever moving...we'll soon see :)

Cactus, Cactus, Cactus...cuttings!

Cactus, Cactus, Cactus!

A few more cactus cuttings for our yard.

Cactus cuttings from three cool looking plants

Three really cool looking cacti &succulents to plant.

On the left is a cactus called "Totem Pole Cactus" and has pretty much zero thorns, the middle is unknown to me and the larger one on the right os called a "Fire Stick Pencil Cactus".



We just got a few more strange looking cacti today which we hope to get into the ground very soon! I will post photos of these new cacti cuttings in a day or so :)

Cactus that blooms white flowers - going to plant cuttings from it soon

Beautiful white flowers bloom for only about a day or so....

Found this great cactus farm while driving around town

Found this great cactus farm while driving around town the other day. It actually looked like a residence. It seemed like instead of adding a standrad front yard, these people made a cactus farm. I wonder if they sell to the public/ I'll have to look into this further...cactus are so cool! I really want to try some cactus grafting.

Cactus photo

I wanted to show you a image of some really cool cactus growing in our yard. Not sure the type of cactus,it was given to us as a gift, however they are very neat!

There are two of the stalk looking cactus. When we received them that's all they were; two stick looking things...They soon grew the off shoots on the sides and the large one has even produced us a beautiful white flower that lasted for only about 1 day. It looked awesome next to that metal flower we have in the pot!

I have plans on cutting off the side growth and replanting them along a wall. I have been told they can get very large, very fast! We'll see!

Cool though, right!?!