Albert's Greenhouse

Like almost every house in my part of Northern California, we have a lemon tree in our backyard. Although warmth loving things like limes and oranges are a long shot most years, lemons do extremely well in our climate, and many kinds produce nearly year-round. Aside from a short hiatus in the summer, we have fresh lemons in the backyard whenever we want them.

Our lemon tree is of questionable parentage, and at different times seems to produce different sorts of lemons, we get huge mis-shapen lemons that look like atrophied hands, smooth round lemons the size of grapefruits, and more normally shaped oblong lemons with thinner skins. All from the same branches of the same tree, as far as I can figure out. The lemons can be watery and mild, or very acidic, or even quite sweet depending on the time of the year, and possibly other factors which I have not yet been able to figure out.

We make lemonade a lot, and we've candied the lemon peels. And whenever a recipe calls for lemon juice, we hop out into the backyard and squeeze a freshly picked lemon off the tree. We do make sure to use only about half the lemon juice called for, as ours is inexplicably strong.

The tree does so well it needs a yearly pruning to keep the lemons from growing out of reach into the sky, or knocking against the wall of our second floor bedroom in the wind. It's truly a monster tree, but I can see why these are so popular around here.

It's finally gotten dry enough for me to consider turning on the lawn and garden irrigation for the season, and this weekend, I finally got around to testing it out. It seems that every winter, there is plentiful opportunity for something to go wrong, and this winter was no exception. Aside from the usual de-clogging of the sprinkler heads ( earwigs tend to find them to be a good nesting place ), I've discovered a spring in my front yard.



Something will have to be done, but as it probably involves a lot of mud, cursing and futile attempts to glue pieces of plastic back together, that might have to wait for the weekend.

When we are children, it seems to us that we are normal. That our family is a normal family, living in a normal town, and doing normal things.

My parents were both avid gardeners - my mother tending her flowers and perennials, and my father his vegetable garden and orchard. Spending the weekends in the garden: weeding, planting harvesting, mowing and pruning.

They both used a tool which they called "kama" for weeding. I thought this was normal - that this tool was the standard weeding tool. I grew up and bought my own house and grew my own garden and went to the hardware store - and found no "kama". Obviously, something was amiss.

It turns out that the "kama" is a Japanese sickle, used for cutting grass, or rice, or what have you. And my parents got it in the mail from our family in Japan, along with the packages of dried seaweed, folding paper, books and bean jelly candies that would arrive occasionally wrapped in brown kraft paper and tied in twine.

The closest thing I could find at the hardware store was a "Cape Cod Weeder", but it was not as sharp, not nearly as well balanced, and the blade was unfortunately small. Years of internet searching later, I finally found what I was looking for here (ko gama means little sickle). Most of the "kama" imported into the US have blades which are much too large and unwieldy to be used seriously for weeding. These are maybe just a little larger than the ones my parents imported from Japan all those years ago - but they still work and they still work well.

Salvia is nothing if not variable.

Perusing the three pages of salvia in the Plant Delights catalog some years ago, Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' caught my eye because of its variable flowers - the same plant can have red flowers, white flowers, and white flowers with a red lip, all at the same time. It helps that my school colors are usually red and white.

This grows in full sun out in front of my house, and I have to trim it to keep it from spreading and getting too scruffy. In the spring, you can see all three flavors of flower, while at other times of the year it seems to depend on temperature.

A few requests and things that don't really go anywhere else:

Judith asked to see a photo of the hanging tomatoes. I don't have one from last year, but here's one with the current young plants:


I have mentioned my new shade garden. It's quite small and under the shade of only a medium sized tree in the corner of my small city lot, but here it is taking some shape:


Asarums are on the right, and I planted out two of my yellow clivias in the back. They should do fine in the ground in this climate until we have one of those once-in-ten-years winters with a 20F freeze. What with global warming, they may be good in there for quite some time to come. I'm trying a few odder things on the left where it's a bit more sunny, including a couple of arisaema in the back.

The first sarracenia flower of the spring. And it had to be one of the bastard yellow ones, too.

These flowers are so absolutely complex and large - they make a really strange plant even stranger. This plant has evolved so its leaves are curled and joined into long hollow tubes, open on the top except for lids to shade them from the rain. The tops of the traps are already like flowers, and even secrete a nectar-like substance. So what are the flowers like? Like little pagodas or lanterns, held high above the traps, before the new traps open so as not to compete for insect attention. They are like little buildings up there, almost reminding me of hot air balloons with their bright colors. Inside is real pollen, real nectar, and not the certain death that will come with the summer.

And the colors! Lime greens, brilliant yellows, the deepest richest ruby red you've ever seen. All in the same fascinating shape.

I grow my sarracenias outdoors sitting in tubs with a couple of inches of water. I have to be sure to put mosquito dunks in the water in the summer to reduce the potential for neighborly wrath at the possible mosquito issue. The potting mix is a combination of virgin peat moss, sand and perlite - very nutrient poor. Sarracenias can't stand much fertilizer, and they do catch their own after all. The Sarracenia leucophylla has always been my favorite, and is probably the only one that I own intentionally. The rest I got from raffles at the Bay Area Carnivorous Plant Society meetings, where I often buy $10 or $20 worth of tickets, and alternate between making out like a bandit to an extent which is almost embarrassing, and getting absolutely nothing.

Sarracenias are native to the southeastern United States, and are probably the easiest carnivorous plant for us to grow here in the San Francisco Bay Area. They will take our winters with no problem, living outdoors all year long. They get their needed winter dormancy from our mild winter conditions, and with the imported Hetch-Hetchy water rather than the liquid rock that is pumped from the ground in some parts of the city,I have no problems with water quality. The plants grow well, I have to divide them every few years, and they catch tons on insects in the summer - mostly moths.

Lecanopteris - the southeast asian ant fern. A stranger looking plant I have not seen in a while, and let me tell you I have seen some strange plants.
This fern ( along with its many strange relatives ) has developed a mutualistic association with ants, which may find a place to live within its long, hollow rhizomes.

The picture is of Lecanopteris sinuosa growing on a cork bark plaque in my greenhouse. It seems to like warm conditions, and in fact I have found that most of the ant ferns I grow die during the winters when the greenhouse is cooler than normal ( maybe 65F minimum ). This is for some reason at odds with the advice I commonly hear saying that ant ferns tend to be highland tropicals. Perhaps they are just picky.

Whatever the case, almost nobody in the US seems to sell these - a few come in from Andreas Wistuba in Germany on occasion, and I got the pictured plant from Tropiflora, but they are certainly not a common plant. Given the beauty of the rhizomes ( and there are many other species, some with even more impressive shapes and coloration ) one would think they would be more available and popular.

I have a history of not researching plants before I buy them. I try to rationalize this by stating that I don't tend to have the problem with very common plants. It's usually something that neither I nor anybody else has heard of before that trips me up.

This Philodendron tenue is a perfect example. Recall that my greenhouse is only six feet tall. Recall further that this is only on one side - the tall side. Philodendron tenue gets these huge three foot long leaves - and it's a climber. It just looked so innocent in a little six inch pot as a seedling.

It's a beautiful plant and I am glad I got it. I just need to prune it soon before it reaches the exhaust fan and gets cut to shreds.

I finally got around to hanging the tomatoes this Saturday - before they got too big to fit through the little holes in the bottoms of the new buckets. A huge bag of potting soil, amended with an entire pound of slow-release fertilizer ( osmocote ), a few shovels full of perlite and a few shovels full of vermiculite, filled four 5-gallon plastic buckets which I had prepared last week.

Last year, I used a chicken manure/vermiculite/potting soil mixture which was a nearly total failure - the plants did not grow very quickly, I think due to lack of certain nutrients. This year, I am heading back towards my original mix of potting soil, slow release fertilizer, and perlite, with the addition of some vermiculite to even out the water content a bit. Blossom end rot and splitting on certain tomatoes has always been a problem for me with this setup. Blossom end rot is a calcium related problem, in that calcium deficiencies at the fruit end of things is the proximate cause, but it's really usually a water supply and demand problem related to there being too much plant and not enough root or water to support the aforementioned plant. The splitting of tomatoes is usually due to uneven water supply. Both of these problems are fairly obviously because 5 gallons is not really enough dirt to support a huge fruiting tomato plant. The vermiculite in the soil mix is an attempt to get a little more even water concentration in the soil.

The buckets each have a 1.5" hole drilled in the bottom with a hole saw, and a wooden brace mounted between the handle attachments on the top. They've been spray-painted, and the plastic handle guard has been moved aside in preparation for handing from my tomato arbor. The tomato plant is unpotted and then placed in the bottom of the bucket, with its top protruding out the bottom. The bucket is set temporarily on a two gallon pot in order to prevent crushing the tomato plant as soil is added. About 5" of soil is added, and then the tomato is re-positioned so that less of the stem is sticking out. Soil is then added to the top, tamped down, and topped off. Taking off the seed leaves of the tomato starts and planting them with a large amount of stem below ground is supposed to help with root formation - tomatoes will root from just about any part of the stem that is wet or in contact with the ground.

Because the tomatoes start out as small plants in huge pots, I don't water them much at first. As the plants grow up, more water is added, until they are basically sucking the pots dry every day, at which point some pinching or pruning is probably in order.

I don't believe that I get great yields from this method. I use it mostly because it's pretty space efficient, and it avoids having tomatoes rotting on the ground. It's less work than trellising. Plus - it makes people stare and ask questions.

I often grow beans or cucumbers out the tops of the buckets - planting those will be the next task. These no doubt contribute to my problems with water in the buckets, but they do shade the tops of the buckets from the worst of the summer sun, and they grow and produce even more vegetables in an admittedly limited area.

After a short delay due to a shipping mixup, my much-anticipated secondary spring order arrived from Plant Delights last week. I may grouse a bit about this place, as they are sometimes a little scattered, and I'm not sure about the value they provide, but I will say that any place that is able to extract $140 from me to ship only eight tissue cultured plants across the country is probably doing something right.
They pack well, they ship well, their documents are all in order so they don't get held up at the California border, and the plants are well-grown. Of course, I'm willing to risk doing business with companies for which this is not the case - but in the case of Plant Delights, they also have stuff that they themselves collected, and which is therefore not available elsewhere.

The plant order ( a bunch of Asarums, plus some other stuff ) is mostly destined to go in my new shade garden, dug out of the bricks covering a little-used corner of the backyard. There is very little shade on my property, other than the seasonal shade under our street tree, so the many attractive shade perennials which are available have never before had a home. In the ever-present spirit of wanting what one cannot have, the shade garden idea was born.

So far, it's the home of a few Clivias, a couple Arisaema and not a small number of the Asarums, or wild gingers, which I really do like for their little hidden flowers, nice scent and generally evergreen leaves.

Some of the more highland of the nepenthes in the greenhouse have some pretty nifty new pitchers out. I can't figure out if it's the cooler temperatures of the winter, or if it's something about the warming of spring, but the highland tropicals in general seem to like this time of the year.




The sarracenias are growing outdoors and are not yet sending up new pitchers, but it is almost flowering season, and I am happy to report that dividing my S. leucophyllas into six new pots doesn't seem to have hampered their growth, and may in fact have set me up for a flower-filled spring - at least CP-wise. The S. leucophylla growing in full sun has a marvelously deep dark red flower, which contrasts nicely with my bastard yellow-flowered ones. So far I only see the buds, but these are harbingers of things to come.

I went shopping for my usual white 5 gallon plastic buckets to do my tomato hangings this year, and I was dismayed to find that all I could get were ghastly orange buckets from Home Depot, or white buckets with a huge green logo from Orchard Supply Hardware. Lacking a significant desire to advertise the hardware purveyor of my choice all summer, I went to the paint aisle seeking a quick and dirty solution.

What I found were some cans of spray paint that purported not only to impart a color to whatever they were applied to, but to also provide something approximating a hammered copper finish. I couldn't resist. About four coats of paint later, I had four copper colored buckets - not perfect by any means, but still better than corporate logos.

I find I need new buckets every few years because the older the buckets become, the more brittle and prone to shattering into millions of pieces they become. They also get mis-shapen due to being hung by the handles. This year, I'm hoping for a slightly longer lifespan due to the shielding of the paint, and I've installed wood braces in the top to keep the things from collapsing laterally.

The tomatoes I started from seed in March are now basically hardened off, and soon will be ready to be installed in their new homes - I just have to mix up about 20 gallons of potting mix if and when it stops raining again.

There's a plant beside my front walkway that has earned the nickname "that square pink bush" due to some plant torture which was implemented long before I moved in. It's an azalea, and it is covered completely in pink blooms in the spring. It's also been trimmed into a sort of oblong rectangular shape. The result is a pink, square object beside the walk for about a month in the spring. After the pink square stage comes the browning and wilted stage due to the fact that this bush holds its petals long after they have died, dried, and decayed. Nothing a thorough raking won't fix, but still a nuisance.

This spring, the bush displayed the results of a problem that I spent most of the summer ignoring. Instead of a green and pink box, it resembled a brown skeleton, with only a few green flowering twigs coming from the base. Most of the bush was dead, and I took a few hours on Sunday morning to 1) excavate the bush and re-plant the remenants and 2) fix the aforementioned and long ignored problem.

The problem in question was a leak in the lawn irrigation system, which left the azalea with wet feet for most of the summer previous. Azaleas, camelias and rhododendrons are all of the sort of acid-well drained-moderate climate school, which usually does well in my neighborhood when it's freed of the relatively dense clay soil that seems to be standard issue. The demise of the azalea was certainly a demonstration that you can't ignore everything you read in the Sunset Western Garden Book.

I was astonished to see another demonstration when I finally started digging up the azalea - why was the center dead and why were there still some perfectly healthy shoots coming from underneath the bush? Further inspection revealed that the green and healthy shoots were actually separate plants - the branches had rooted themselves.

I believe I saw this technique on TV at one point - basically taking a branch of a rhododendron and pinning it to the ground under the bush until it rooted, and then cutting it off. Whatever the cause, I now have two smallish azaleas in pots, and one medium sized azalea in the space that originally housed the now defunct plant.

If nothing else believes it's really spring now, the Anthuriums in my greenhouse know.

Before you get all excited about possible pictures of pretty flowers, I would like to make one thing clear: Being a certified plant nut, I'm not growing those domesticated things you see in your florist shop. I'm growing just about everything else, but not those. So the flowers I speak of are perhaps going to be a little disappointing. They're mostly kind of beige, green and dark purple, for instance. They're also pretty small. No petals here.

Anthurium is a huge genus, and there are plenty of undescribed species to go around. All but maybe 3 species have fairly nondescript blooms when compared to the florist's anthurium. I grow them for the leaf patterns, mostly, not the flowers.

So here we go:
See? I told you. Nothing really that spectacular.

Above is Anthurium veitchii. To the left, Anthurium reflexinervum. To the right, Anthurium friedrichstallii.

There are a bunch more below.






The anthurium spadix ( the long hot-dog shaped part, for those of you less technical readers ) contains many small male and female flowers, all clumped together. After the flower opens, the female flowers are first to mature, often exuding a slightly sticky liquid. If pollen lands on the spadix at that time, the female flowers will be fertilized. Eventually, the female flowers become either fertilized or infertile, and then the male flowers produce a coating of sticky pollen.

Anthurium flowers are mostly not self-fertile because the pollen appears only after the female flowers have finished. In order to get seed, I need to find plants in bloom at the same time, one in the earlier female stage and one in the later pollen producing stage. Many of my anthurium plants frustrate this because I may have only one plant in flower at a time. If I do manage to pollinate, I get will often get berries, usually red in color. The journey from berry to fullgrown plant is a long one.

For whatever reason, anthurium seedlings are very slow to grow for me. Perhaps that is just the way they are, or perhaps they need some sort of symbiotic fungus, or ant interaction, or just some more fertilizer. In any case, the journey from seed to even a small plant can take years.

On the other hand, from small plant to large plant can be very fast.

I have some seedlings of highland anthuriums that I have been growing for three years or more, and which only now have exceeded 4" is size. This is for a plant which eventually will become very large, at least in the wild.

So I wait, and I watch for two flowers at the same time, and I hope that someday I will get some more berries.

So I'm reading the garden blog-o-sphere. And everybody's blogging about spring. It's in the air - the snow's melting - time to get your seeds planted, clean up the yard. Almost mowing season again.

Where I live, the case could be made that it's really spring about 10 months out of the year. The climate is, by any definition, mild. We had no hard freeze this year, and I doubt that even the official temperature at the airport dipped below 32F.

So people in much colder climes are getting cherry blossoms. Good for them. When do I get mine?

This is what I have:


Encouraging, yes, but hardly a match for, say, Vancouver right now.

It's admittedly a pitiful tree. I got it late in the season from the local hardware store, and planted it into the wet, mucky ground, where it has barely hung on through various abuses for a couple of years now. It's a double weeping cherry, a plant with at least two grafts. Sort of a frankenstein plant, with roots from one tree, a trunk from another, and branches from a third. It has stayed basically the same size for two years, though I detect a slight increase in vigor this spring. I walk by bigger trees flowering in their pots for less money at the big box store down the road, and I hope that someday I will be rewarded for my patience.

At least I have the peach blossoms already, with the promise of a little fruit this year.

Well - strange buds on my Chinese wisteria ( Wisteria sinensis ) have turned into what appears to be flowers.

My wisteria is growing in a 2 gallon pot, attached to a 2 foot trellis, and it's going to stay that way for the forseeable future, especially if it flowers in that pot, as it apparently does. This is one of my attempts at bonsai, the ancient art of tree torture. And as with many aspects of my life, it was brought about by poorly researched decision making.

For many years, I lived in San Jose, close to Kelly Park, which contains a magnificent Japanese garden. On the fence of that garden are trained some very beautiful Japanese Wisterias - Wisteria floribunda, which I have admired more than a few times.

So you can imagine my joy at finding, for the grand price of $5.00, a bare root wisteria at the local hardware store a couple of winters ago. Of course, I snapped it up, carted it home, and planted the somewhat underwhelming stick that was in the bag of sawdust. I then did some reading on wisteria.

The thing you find from reading about wisteria on the web is that a lot of people don't like it very much. It's apparently invasive in much of the southeast of the USA, and tends to overgrow the places it's planted. Though it has beautiful flowers, it also goes to seed, spreads, pulls down arbors, and generally makes a nuisance of itself. Thus was born the plant torture project.

The most beautiful pictures I saw on the web of Wisteria involved Bonsai. Or at least pot-grown and trained plants which were almost completely covered with blooms in the spring. So I got the pot, I got the trellis, and I trained the wisteria onto the trellis. And let me tell you, this plant wants to grow bigger in a bad way. I have to cut back the tendrils of this plant almost as often as I mow the lawn.

My perserverence in the face of massive plant growth potential appears to be paying off, however. This spring, what I thought were surely going to be the buds of more leaves and more twining tendrils, have actually begun to sprout the characteristic purple racemes that I was looking for in the first place.

There's something magic about bulbs. It's kind of like the magic in seeds - you buy this little dessicated thing for not too much money, and you put it in the ground. Then later, maybe months later, something comes up out of that very same ground, and it's not dessicated and brown - it's alive and green and beautiful.

Bulbs have a certain marketing magic to them as well. In the dead of winter, when everything is dark and damp and not really into growing, the shelves of the nursery are packed with mesh bags carrying pictures of beautiful flowers. How can you not buy just a few of the odder looking things? Or some tulips? Or beautiful scented hyacinth? It's not as if these are as difficult to grow as the things in the seed rack, after all.

But you buy the bulbs and tubers and corms and whatever else, and you think: I will plant these tomorrow. You might think this for several weeks, as it's really quite nasty outside right now, and there are other tasks that might be accomplished inside. Where it's not cold and raining. And then you realize ... that these bulbs ... and tubers and corms ... are sprouting. Prematurely. Inside. And you realize that your investment is going to sprout Right There in the Garage. And you become a little nervous. And you think - maybe tomorrow is not the right time. Maybe today would be better.

There's not a lot of daylight in the winter. But in the waning light, you might go outside and push the little dry things into the earth, quickly, in a place which seems appropriate. Little things like labels are not of paramount importance in the cold and damp and rapidly approaching dark. Getting Them Planted. Saving Their Lives. Saving Your Investment. That's what concerns you at the time.

So in the spring, I watched with curiosity as the green shoots broke soil. Not exactly sure what we have here. Most of them look like Irids of some sort. And there's these grass-like leaves...

But where we first had only leaves, and then buds, we now have flowers, and I can tell that I chose well last winter, and that some of my choices actually survived to flower for me in the first days of spring. Fritillaria was on the package, and searching the web, I appear to have Fritillaria meleagris - the only Fritillaria native to Britain.

More research reveals that there are 100 different kinds, and societies devoted to their upkeep, and colors and shapes and all sorts of Really Cool Stuff. But I just have one this year, and that's enough. The web says they'll be around for many years to come under my weeping cherry, flowering in the spring and multiplying by dividing.

The web also says that Fritillaries have cells with massive amounts of DNA - almost 25x that found in human cells. What this means, nobody seems to know, but if there's ever a DNA shortage, I guess I'll be on the cutting edge of the solution.

My wife and I were driving up interstate 280 ( there's a sign just north of Cupertino which proclaims "World's Most Beautiful Highway" ) through the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains this past weekend, and we were admiring the banks of yellow wildflowers alongside the road. There were fields of yellow mustard, fields of Oxalis (Yellow Wood Sorrel), and banks of daffodils that someone had planted.

From a distance, which is about the only way you're going to see them going at 65 miles an hour down an eight lane highway, they all sort of blended together, and it was difficult to distinguish one from the other. Which begs the question - why did anybody go to the trouble of planting the daffodils, when the mustard and Oxalis basically plant themselves? Planting daffodils is hard work - spreading some mustard seed is pretty easy. The effect is basically the same - daffodils naturalize for a while, mustard has naturalized almost everywhere around here and shows no signs of giving up. In fact, it grows right alongside some of the daffodils.

I would suggest that there are several possible answers to this question. Perhaps the mysterious daffodil planters had never seen the area they planted during daffodil flowering season, and so did not know that their daffodils would be flowering betwixt the yellow Oxalis and mustard. Perhaps the government mandated the planting of these daffodils as a sort of ill-informed beautification project. Perhaps some danish bulb company was trying to advertise its wares. Or perhaps people just value the traditional daffodil more than the local weeds.

But they're all spring flowering and they're all bright yellow... tulips would be another story altogether. Or Amorphophallus, or a typhonium... There would be something you don't see every day.

Of course, that's the point. I am not interested in the everyday, the mundane. Most of the gardening world is - and I understand it well. They look for the easy and familiar - the macaroni and cheese rather than the beef wellington.

I garden because I want to see nature, and to see what's not like where I grew up - to see Strange New Things - to see and experience the workings of the hand of God ( or the hand of Darwin, depending on your allegiances ). The average gardener wants something pretty and easy and familiar. That's obvious when you go to a garden show or the local nursery.

And so the daffodils are there amongst the mustard and the sorrel. Cheap, familiar and reliable - but just enough work to make you feel like you're accomplishing something big.

(In case you're wondering, the daffodils pictured are a gift from a friend and not from the side of the road. They were purchased at Trader Joe's as a little clump of buds - but once put in water, they literally opened in hours and lasted for about a week. Surprised? We certainly were. )

One of the most difficult things about accumulating strange tropical plants is keeping track of what you have - the names and sources of each plant, random information about its care, propagation history, and many more useful bits of information all need to reside somewhere, and be ready to call up when you're contemplating the purchase of a new plant - just in case for instance you forgot what it was that you originally had.

I've had various systems to accomplish this at various times of my life, and as my collection grew to over 1000 different species of plants, and then shrank to the current state holdings of around 400 species ( not counting the weeds and unidentified things ), I've come to some conclusions about labels.

I keep a database in Microsoft Excel which serializes each plant and contains some information including its name, perhaps a picture, its source and any comments I would like to keep with the plant. Each plant also gets a vinyl label with its name and serial number. After trying various methods to generate these labels, I've finally come up with a system which works for me. It's not perfect, and it's subject to revision as time goes by, but so far it's been working well for almost a year.

On Label Materials: Vinyl labels hold up well, though not perfectly, to sun, humidity and temperature. Eventually, some brands do get a little bit yellowed or brittle, but they seem to hold up better than wood and are cheaper than metal. They also take pencil easily, and can be cut or punched to fit odd situations for those plants that need wired tags or some such thing. Many people actually find that they need to wire tags to everything because of soil shifting and pots getting knocked over. I haven't needed to do that except for in certain baskets and plaques.

On Label Pens: Use pencil. Don't argue, just do it. I know what you're thinking, but sharpie permanent markers, for instance, fade in the sun within a year to complete illegibility. Pencil is more or less permanent unless your mealy bugs start to grow gum erasers.

Computerised Method: I've developed this past year a method of printing, directly from my database, and on a standard laser printer, waterproof adhesive labels that stick to my vinyl label material and that do appear to fade. This is a great and relatively low cost method if you already own a laser printer, and don't want to spend the cash for a horticultural label printer.
I ordered some adhesive polyester label material from planetlabel.com that runs just fine through a normal laser printer. I then used Microsoft Word's address label function to import information from my Excel inventory spreadsheet and print the labels. A bit of work with a paper cutter cutting thing things into strips of the appropriate size, and I was good to go. I made over 400 labels quite quickly and so far they've held up very well to everything my greenhouse can dish out. The printing is of course very legible, high contrast, and neat looking to boot.
The only reservations I have with this system, is that it's not very efficient if you just need a couple of new labels - to really get the most from it, you need to do a whole page of labels at a time. It's also unclear how resistant the labels are to abrasion - I've had a little fading of some of the labels where the toner hasn't bonded properly to the plastic.

Metal Labels: I picked up a few packets of metal display labels for some of the larger and more important trees and shrubs in my landscaping and in my greenhouse. These can sell for a lot of money at the garden center, but they're available fairly cheaply either at online stores or on e-bay. I use a Brother adhesive label maker to write the actual labels, which I then adhere to the metal tags, and I have some of these that have held up for many years outside in the direct sun.

There was a request for a full picture of the Sempervivum Diversity Project ( see archive ). So here it is, complete with a dandelion. Many parts of my garden are like this, which is why I show you so many close-ups...

The tomato seedlings from the beginning of the month have been re-potted into 3.5" pots and placed into my sorry excuse for a cold frame - that being in reality an old 20 gallon fishtank pushed up against the greenhouse wall. They are surviving through the month with more rainy days than any other month on record here in the past 100 years. If we ever get some sun, I am sure they will take off.


Meanwhile, the Zantedeschia "Hercules" has two HUGE flowers:

... and I don't have particularly small hands, either.