I was presented with several surprises this week.
In the good category, we got rain! It wasn't much, just 0.09/inch in total, but it was enough to wash the dust from leaves, freshen the air, and fill my 50-gallon rain tank. I picked up another 35 gallons of rainwater in my mid-sized tank and probably something similar in my 265-gallon tank, which is more difficult to measure.
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| The clouds teased us for a long time Monday afternoon before the rumbling of thunder announced that the storm was moving closer |
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| Lightning and thunder was followed by big fat raindrops but it didn't last long. This is a view of the harbor late Monday afternoon after the rain stopped. However, we were treated to a light show later that evening with intra-cloud lightning (aka sheet lighting) that lasted a couple of hours, followed by more rain. |
The bad surprise was my discovery of another mimosa tree (Albizia julibrissin) seedling. I noticed it entirely by accident through a small gap in the hedge that lines the backyard border. It was sitting along the property line on the back slope behind a peach tree, where it'd probably have remained invisible to me until the peach tree lost its leaves this winter had I not gotten that unexpected glimpse. Worse yet, like the last one, this seedling had also sprung from one of the original tree's roots. In the interest of preventing my nightmare of waking up to a slope covered in a forest of mimosa trees, I've ordered a product designed to kill underground roots like these.
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| I didn't measure it but I'd estimate that it was at least 4 feet tall. The neighbors recently had a gardener in to clean up their side of the slope and the removal of the weeds made the tree seedling more visible. My husband removed it and a portion of the tree root it sprang from but the slope is relatively steep there so he didn't get a lot of the root out. He missed the smaller seedling to the left of the big one. I didn't notice it until I reviewed this photo either...Ugh! |
The other surprises are plant oddities.
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| This is one of the blooms produced by the Dahlia 'Cafe au Lait' I purchased in July as a full-grown plant from a local garden center. All the flowers have been funky but the ones like this with only half a flower are the weirdest. I read here that this and other distortions may be caused by a pest called the tarnished plant bug. |
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| Hybrid Helianthus 'Lemon Queen' is supposed to produce multiple branches to form a clump of sunflowers (as shown here). I cut the first sunflowers just above a leaf and it did this. Subsequent flowers formed along the main stem next to a branching leaf but the branches themselves didn't produce flowers. All the plants did this, although some flowers along the stem didn't open as fully as those in this photo. |
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