@jeffswet I looked up your flowers and recognized them - the spidery ground cover or pot variety of portulaca. Pretty flowers. I am not particularly a fan of cacti myself, but I do think your Christmas cacti is one of the more attractive ones and I can see the similarity in the flower size and shape to the same portulaca you enjoy. Pretty flowers, all of them.
@Pammy53 Thank you for your compliments but I’m no pro, lol - that’s my mom. I used to say she was a tidy English gardener, but then I learned that English gardeners tend to be a little bit sloppy, a little more nature-like in their plantings, so I guess she’s a tidy French gardener even though she’s from England herself. Her father/my grandfather was an immaculate gardener as was her sister. So I’ve grown up hearing her/their terminology. My dad, as an architect, also knows a lot about landscaping, so I’ve heard him talk about plants most of my life, too, though he usually talks about a different kind of plant than a flower.
I’ve been fascinated by flower bouquets for as long as I can remember. I can very clearly recall the first three bouquets I received before age 18.
We have a really hard time getting things to grow here in Salt Lake at 5,000 feet above sea level and with temperatures ranging from 110°F in the heat of the summer to 50°F at night. It’s an intense desert with very little natural precipitation in the summer (usually just an inch from June through September, and 14” throughout the rest of the year). We’re under a lot of pressure not to water lawns or gardens anymore thanks to the dire droughts of the past decade, though last year was a record-wet year with flooding (about 230% above average). This year was also an above-average wet year (about 130%). Even with these two good water years, our biggest reservoirs remain far from full but at least our smaller, recreational reservoirs are at a healthier capacity again.
Our low winter temperatures and mere 6.5 hours of winter daylight (the 11,000+ feet mountains surrounding our valley very dramatically, negatively impact the scant time of winter daylight here) also affect our ability for plants to survive out the year to make it back to summer.
From October through April, our daytime temperatures range from 30 to 40°F and our evening temperatures range from 0 to 20°F. Our average first autumn freeze occurs on October 17. During May our daytime temperatures are 40 to 50°F with evenings at 32 to 40°F. The average last frost date in spring is May 7th. This year it was May 10/11. Last year it was May 23.
Then Bam! All of a sudden it’s June and it’s 90 to 110°F by day!!!!!! Gross! It’s a hard place to live as a human, let alone a flower in the ground! We really only get about two weeks of spring and two weeks of autumn, if we’re lucky. We’re either wearing shorts and tank tops or heavy corduroy pants and 10 coats. There’s very little time for three-quarter inch sleeves and capri-length pants with say, a leightweight jean jacket.
We also have pretty crappy dirt around here. It’s dry and salty because it used to be under the bigger waters of Lake Bonneville, which was the predecessor to the current Great Salt Lake and filled this entire valley full of water. If you’ve ever wanted to see the GSL, I suggest you get out here ASAP because that thing is about to vanish forever and neither the city, state, nor federal government gives any craps.
“Soils in Salt Lake are usually alkaline with a pH of 8 or more. The water is also alkaline and will be high in salts. Alkaline soils with a high pH level above 8.0 can impact the health of some landscape plants that are sensitive to high pH soils, resulting in the immobility of iron and foliage that looks dull green or yellowish).”
So it’s hard to garden here. You really have to pay strict attention to shade and temperature zones that plants can endure. Even then, you’ll usually lose at least 4/5 of your flowers each year by early August, even if they’re supposed to be perennials. Hardly anything can survive five months of temperatures over 90°F, even in the shade.
Oh yeah, did I mention it’s dry here? Average humidity is only 14% so it’s not like Southern California’s 70% average humidity where you can have gigantic Bougainvillea and Agapanthus bushes that get all of their water just from the moisture in the air! No, you have to water *everything* here.
It’s funny because I sound like a gardener, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve only had plants for the past two years. Two years ago, I moved into a condo and I bought three potted plants for my deck in the month of September. Those were thoroughly destroyed by nature by the end of October. Last year I spent $1,500 in a manic phase of flower buying for my deck. Everything was going great and I was really, really happy after having lost two close family members that spring. But then it turns out my deck has no drainage pipe; it doesn’t have any sort of rain gutter. It’s just built at a downward slant, which I checked, is actually well within building code, so any water that comes out of my plants spills down onto my lowest neighbor’s patio below me. That’s going to happen anyway when it rains, but she blames me for it and tried to get me evicted for the water from my plants on her patio - as if i’m responsible for their being no rain gutter! Accordingly, anytime I watered the plants on my deck, they had to be moved away from the deck edge, and put into the bright sunlight where they promptly failed. I had to water less, so the few that remained then failed, also. And when water spilled, I had to use a set of eight towels to gather it up into a big bucket, them overuse my washing and drying machines to clean said towels.
So I spent last August in September with a gutted heart and an empty view devoid of flowers my big expenditure.
Crappy lesson learned
This year so far, all I have are my indoor plants. But my cat is dying for me to get some outdoor plants so he can hide out under them from the sun. I don’t know what to do. Last year I also tried putting the buckets of plants into empty XXXXL giant Tupperware-type storage containers buckets, but then the water in those buckets got so heavy, with my skeleton that’s turned to ash inside my living body, I don’t have the strength to dump out that water and those plants that were in those Tupperware containers just rotted, too!
I’m sure nobody has actually read through this long, irrelevant-to-the-NAFC post, but if somebody has happened to read this post and also happens to have a suggestion for how I can have plants on my deck without water running down onto my neighbors patio, I’d be thrilled to learn about it. I even had the building inspector come out here because I thought they would order the builder to install rain gutters, but nope, that didn’t happen.
They might have a few ideas. - Pam
