Venus Fly Trap, Gladiolus, Phlox

New template design. Like it? Heh! I was told that the template I had on here was years old and that I should hit the template library for a fresh design. Now it's got that Google +1 that's sweeping the internet by storm.

Venus Fly Trap

My VFT is doing good. You can see a couple traps have dead bugs in them so they're slowly thriving. It's impossible to tell from this angle but this pot sits on top of a saucer that has rainwater in it.

Gladiolus

 I thought I had a gladiolus that was red with yellow 'throats'. This one is more on the pinkish/purplish side.

Butterfly in Phlox

In the humid morning when the sun comes out and there's no wind, there's this strong heady smell that surrounds this huge batch of White Phlox. I took a few pictures of this butterfly and this one came out the clearest.

Venus Fly Trap and other updates

The left amaryllis clump has tons of blooms coming up and getting ready to open. The middle clump is my seed-grown batch and there's still only two buds (which I am still ecstatic about!). The right clump is still slow going. In the back are the banana plants. For some reason, the leaves of the largest one is coming out all damaged. I'm not sure what's going on with that one.

A close-up of an amaryllis bud from my seed-grown batch. Fingers tapping impatiently...

My dragon arum plants are still slowly opening. You can see the purple edging on the left one. It's getting close now.

Two purple iris flowers and a pollinated seed pod to the side.

I got to thinking that I really miss my prickly pear flowering every spring so I yanked the plant out of its terrible pot and repotted it in a much larger pot (which is semi-medium). Suddenly one pad just shot out so it's extremely happy at the moment.

It took me a little bit to remember what these are in the amaryllis bed. I knew they weren't weeds and I do remember opening a packet and just scattering the seeds all willy nilly without doing anything else. I believe these are the Blue Queen Salvia seedlings.

And yes.... I finally got a Venus Fly Trap today! It's kinda weird because I usually see Venus Fly Traps in red pots with a plastic 'cup' on top. I've never seen it sold like this before. The pot is very tiny and I can't help but feel I need to repot it so that it doesn't dry out so fast. Either that or I'll just have to set up a dish with some rocks so that water always touches the bottom.

Venus Fly Trap

I was looking over my old gardening pictures from 2005 and 06 (It appears earlier disks require a UDF Reader and it doesn't work on this computer. Ouch.). I saw this picture of a Venus Fly Trap that I used to own, dated August 24, 2006.

It's hard to tell but I have it sitting on top of a slightly domed lid that's resting on top of a plastic bowl with water. The domed lid comes from one of those old mosquito repellent things that you light up and put the lid over it. I figured it'd sink into the water a bit so that the VFT pot was always touching the water.

The plant lived for a couple years until that year (2006) it insisted on growing out of the bottom of the pot (The picture there sort of demonstrates it. The clump on the left was growing out of the bottom of the pot). After that winter, it never came back.

Looking at this picture makes me want to buy another one this year. I think I will!