Companion planting in wine barrels

Just added some companion flowers and plants into the yard and garden this past few days. Here are some images of our wine barrel flower beds.

 The empty spaces are filled with seeds that should sprout in a week or so. I have herbs in the smaller pots next to the wine barrels. You may also notice a cape honeysuckle in-between the wine barrel and the edge  of our raised garden bed in the top image. The cape honeysuckle should grow tall and provide both shade for the garden as well as beautiful orange flowers to attract the great hummingbirds!

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.

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 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 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!?!