Many folks think Hawaii doesn't have any seasons, but nobody told that to the orchids. Many of the plants and flowers around here pay attention to seasons and will bloom or fruit only at certain times of the year. Of course, there's usually something blooming throughout the year, but many plants will only bloom at certain times.
I think the red, pink & white orchid that is pictured above is a 'phalenopsis' orchid, I don't grow orchids in any kind of serious manner so I could be entirely wrong. I call it a 'butterfly' orchid, since that's another (and much easier to spell) name for them around here, although it probably isn't technically a correct name. Oh wellos, as mentioned, I'm not a serious orchid person. There are some folks who breed orchids, keep their labels and names with them, critic them as to size, color, etc., and get seriously fussy about orchids. I just keep a few around because they are pretty. They are also easy to grow if they're left outside. It's the inside ones which are much more difficult, IMHO, although some of the orchid people tell me it's different varieties which are more difficult to grow.
The white, pink and red orchid pictured above was outside until it started blooming, now it's gotten as far as the front porch. Once it's done blooming, it will go back outside and live stuck in a tree somewhere. Or in a tree fern, orchids like tree ferns.
Most orchids have a hard to spell name, this particular one is an 'oncidium', I'm pretty sure. Folks around here call them either 'dancing ladies' since each individual flower looks like a little dancing lady and I've also heard them called 'popcorn' orchids. Maybe because they just keep popping out?
This is one of my more favorite orchids, even though the orchid folks think they are common as dirt. Considering how much of this island is lava rock instead of dirt, you'd think they'd value dirt more. In any case, I like it. It's festive and yellow and absolutely maintenance free. We try not to mow over it, that's about all the care it gets and it doesn't seem to mind. I've seen this particular type and variety of orchid be about the size of a shrub. The individual plant is pretty small, but they kinda colonize and multiply into a pile of them. This one is in front of the bunny hutch, periodically I toss bunny 'berries' (manure) on them, so for orchids around here, it's getting star treatment.
You'd think I'd know enough by now to plant tomatoes on the shady side of the garden. On the sunny side, they pretty much get really big and then make shade over the rest of the garden. They've also gotten rather large and I think their roots are interfering with the nearby lettuces and beets. There's also a line of celery plants, but those are growing in the holes of the concrete blocks that make up the raised bed garden so the tomato roots shouldn't disturb them. There's some new lettuce coming up under the 'teepee' of old white refrigerator racks. That's to keep the new lettuce from being stepped on by the one remaining rooster. The chickens discovered the garden and started raiding it, (wretched tomato eating chickens!) so they all got deported (it's easy to find folks who want hens) but there's still one rooster left. So far he's been uncatchable, I'm hoping he will wander off on his own without the hens around.
I only planted one type of tomato for the summer season, a pointy Roma type called "Jersey Giant". Fairly large for a Roma, lovely flavor and the fruit flies don't bother it. Last season, I had planted a cherry tomato type, one that looks a lot like a black cherry. That variety reseeded itself and now it's trying to take over the whole end of the garden. It makes nice little tomatoes, but I'm not sure if we're getting enough tomatoes to make up for the space it takes up. The cherry tomato plant is the one taking up most of the room and it seems to keep expanding on a daily basis.
I've been trying not to cut the tomato plants back, usually they just get pushed into a big clump. As the invading cherry tomatoes were being corraled, it woke up a lizard visitor to the garden. This is a Jackson's chameleon and since it has horns, he's a male. Since they eat bugs and not tomatoes, he's welcome to hang out in the garden as much as he wants. I've seen a few females, too, and in different sizes so it's not all the same lizard.
It's usually somewhat startling to find them. All of a sudden a leaf transforms itself into a chameleon and * poof * there's a lizard in front of your nose. They don't move very fast at all, their tail grips on to things, they have tiny scratchy toenails and they don't really bite or anything, but it's much easier to have a chameleon as a pet if he's living out in the tomatoes instead of inside in a cage.
This is Daisy, doesn't she have just the cutest little doe face ever?
Daisy is pretty much done with her coat evaluation time now, her baby coat has pretty much grown into an adult coat. She clumps a little bit on her forehead and there's a little bit behind her ears. She's going to get sheared either later this week or early next week. I like letting their coats grow out fully for evaluation. With sheep, the lamb's wool is much better than sheep's wool, but with the bunnies, their adult coat is actually better than their baby coat.
She is just about four months old now and it's about time for her and her sister Buttercup to move into their own space or in with the doe herd. They are still about a month too young to breed, but it doesn't hurt to be careful.
Things have been pretty busy around here and it's not all been about bunnies. There is a - let's be polite and call it a 'distressed' - property next door to us. It's been vacant for as long as we've been living here (almost five years now) except when there were squatters in there for a month or two who trashed it. Those squatters said they were fixing it, but they were tearing out more stuff than putting in new stuff and just making a big mess.
The property has some major access issues since the driveway to the back of the house and to the never-quite-finished garage that was being built up in back is actually on the property next door. When the squatters annoyed the next door people who own the driveway, the next door people put a fence along their property line which went right across the driveway and cut off drivable access to the back. I would have done the same thing, those squatters were not particularly nice people. They came in and claimed they'd bought the place, they were quite brazen about the whole thing and then they complained about all kinds of things and wanted other folks to do things for them. Anyway, they finally got booted out and they've been gone about a year now leaving a huge mess behind.
The line of white posts is the property line. The house sits on top of a fairly steep slope and there's that ever-so-lovely three to four foot high cement wall between the front of the property and cement driveway going further up the hill to the not-quite-finished garage in back. So far, one thought of how to solve this problem has been to raise the whole house up about four feet and fill in the carport in back and build a driveway up the steep slope and continue it on up to the garage in back. Not sure if that will be what we will do, at the moment, it's just a thought. The whole hillside topography isn't conducive to grading a new driveway all the way up to the back, not if there's a turn out to the carport behind the house if that carport remains at the same grade.
Looking at the garage way up in the back which is pretty close to our back property line and which would be nice to have we're contemplating the possibility of a driveway from the back of our yard across to the not-quite-finished garage. It seemed a good idea to think about buying the poor distressed house ourselves. I'd tried talking all kinds of friends and relatives into it, but they all took one look at the project and pretty much ran away screaming. Hmpf! So, we are preparing for a wee bit of a project. It has kept us pretty busy already and we haven't even started working on it. So far we've had to get a rental house ready to sell so we could pay for the next door project. It's going to be a pretty much straight across trade, which means no extra money for getting contractors or paying for materials. Pretty soon we will do an overall evaluation of what to do first and as well as the overall plan. It will be an interesting project, no doubt.
There will undoubtably be more pictures of the project as it goes along. Maybe some 'before' pictures, but at this moment, it's all 'before' pictures. Once the project is done, it should be really lovely with a gorgeous ocean view, but it's gonna be a huge pile of work to get it to that point. Still, it will be nice to have a garage and that's almost finished. Hopefully we will be able to find out why it wasn't finished and fix whatever was wrong. Guess we will find out.
