Mark the Date - Green Elephant Plant Swap

If Pixy's link doesn't take you right there, first make sure you are logged in with your user name. Then at the bottom of any main forum page is a link for "member services page". Then chose the option to "Edit your exchange lists". Then start typing! :)

Hmmm. Thanks grrrnthumb. I think I was almost there. I found the option to edit my profile, maybe I just didn't read my options carefully enough.

Pixy,

I have large maple and fatsia leaves for you. I'd still love your cherry trees if you were planning on bringing them to the trade. If not, no worries. :) It will be good to see you again. Have your hellebores bloomed yet? Mine haven't but they are getting bigger!

Hee hee, Pixy, have you ever thought of doing a lacey version of a Ligularia. Something keeps eating mine. But I'd be happy to bring 'em. Ha.

Howdy, jburesh! The cherry trees are much too big to bring to the swap! They've found homes, but there is another sapling that I may be able to bring. I can't remember how tall it is but I'll check it out tomorrow and send you a photo if it's small enough to bring up.
Do you have a trade list yet? I put mine on gardenweb so be sure to check it out. I will still have things to add to it, like I'm sure I have some grasses that need another home.
My hellebores haven't bloomed yet, but I didn't really expect them to this year. They are definitely big enough to bloom next year, though. I was just looking through that shade bed yesterday and hoping that they are true to name. I'm going to be sorely disappointed if not. I have big leafed maple leaves but I would love other varieties, and I would really like fatsia leaves! Have you seen the new fatsia 'spider web'? I may have to get that one.

Yeah, thanks for the offer of 'lacey ligularia'! LOL! I'm thinking that would not be very attractive in cement, though.

I'll bring you some fatsia then no worries about the trees. Glad they've found good homes! I'm always a sucker for grasses. I'll be bringing blue fescua seedlings, purple clover, ajuga (unnamed). Mostly common stuff , though if you are interested in red knautia or a red dragon persicaria I'll have those too.

I'm trying to remember my goal: to leave with fewer plants than I came with!! I want a very small pot ghetto over the winter. LOL!

Pixy, I'm right there with you! I definitely want to reduce what I have and not get more....

In fact, do you have room to winter over a Panama Pacific? I'm retiring my container pond and would rather give my one lonely little waterlily away than compost it. So far, I think it's still alive but one good cold night and that will be that. It hasn't done too well for me, my container is too small. So maybe I should just toss it-but I could bring it next weekend......

Pot ghetto, LOL. So that's what you call it. I built my house about 7 years ago and my "holding area" has never gone down to zero yet. It usually gets close though right before a big trade or sale so I can justify getting more.
My wife will love that one.

Pot ghetto. I love it. My goal was to get rid of mine this summer. Didn't do it, but made good progress. I've revised my goal now and just don't want any plant to live in the ghetto for more than a year. I think I'm also going to create some stepping-type structure so that I can see what's waiting . . . sort of low-income housing . . .

Who was it I was talking to about hazelnuts earlier in the year? Didn't realize that I had native hazelnuts, but after discovering my first one, I realize that I have quite a few more. They're suckering through my chainlink fence. Argh!!! I need to clean out a two-foot zone around the fence on the outside, but that's 150 feet of work and "I just don't wanna". It's winter work for sure, but it'll be wet and messy . . .

My pot ghetto is down to a couple tenants, and they will be moving to new digs soon - sorry, couldn't let that one pass...

I have some work that falls into this category as well - put it off long enough & winter will have arrived: the best excuse for waiting.
I am not a procrastinator until it comes to soggy cold weather. Then I will do my best "lalalalalalalalalala" so I don't hear myself scolding me!

Oh, Katye, that's bad [good].

Sure, I'll take your Panama Pacific, susybell. I have to overwinter one other lily so may as well try two. Mine didn't even bloom this year. Not enough sunshine for it. If I'm not successful next year, I'm giving up on zone denial in the pond.

I love my native hazels for the birds and squirrels they bring to the yard. But they do run rampant a bit.

I got the pot ghetto down to a mild roar earlier in the summer but I always seem to find a way to fill it up again. Nature abhors a vacuum.

But I need a male and a female to produce fruit on a Hazelnut, right, Pixy? Apparently there's only the one gender around at my place. Just the same, there are lots of birds and squirrels. One reason that I have parakeets is to hear that cheep, cheep, cheep sound. And when the cats went in and out, I would leave all the doors and windows open and the indoor birds and the outdoor birds would really get going. Gotta find some cat-proof screens so I can hear that all again.

I don't know about the male/female thing on hazelnuts. All of my trees apparently produce nuts. They are very difficult to see, so maybe yours have nuts, too but you miss them. They completely blend in with the leaf, and if memory serves me (don't quote me on it) the nut will be underneath the leaf. Also, there may not be lots of nuts on a tree. Some of mine don't produce that many. But I can always tell fall because the stellar's jays come to steal the hazels. My dog chased one off yesterday and the jay was so angry it landed on top of the rose arbor and fussed at me face to face. You'd think it would fuss at the dog! But I guess it thought I was in charge. Silly bird.

Jays are pretty agressive. They used to get on either side of my cat while she was walking along the top of the fence and harrass her until she just jumped down. :-)

I'm pretty sure I'd notice if there were hazelnuts around. So this is what I found out: "Hazelnuts are self infertile, so at least two different cultivars or seedling plants are needed to produce nuts." and 'Most filberts are self unfruitful." Okay, now you've got me going. I'll have to find out how to get nuts!! [I already know how to GO nuts. Hahaha]

So, Pixy, what's the best way to go about learning to make a hypertufa leaf ?

HI Pixy, Glad to hear it! I'll plan to bring it this weekend. Mine did bloom, but the flower was very small. It took a while, though, and it didn't bloom until it was in the black pot. I think it helped the water heat enough.

I didn't know hazelnuts were self-infertile. I've got a small beaked hazelnut that does produce hazelnuts (about 10 of them) that the squirrels always get. So, that must mean that there are either two trees I thought was just one, or there's another one nearby somewhere? Or is the beaked an exception?

I tried to talk Pixy into doing a workshop earlier this summer and she turned me down....Pixy, how did you get started making leaves?

LOL! It started with what looked like a fun craft and turned into an obsession. I make them without even knowing WHY I make them now. I have an entire little studio turned over to making leaves. I sold a few last year but I haven't really tried to do so yet. Just now I am making small ones that hang on the wall. I don't do hypertufa, I just use either mortar mix or I mix my own using fine sand and white cement. Hypertufa is too rough and doesn't give a refined texture to the product. I don't do workshops because it's hard for me to remember how I've done things. I don't keep notes, which I guess I should do. It's embarassing for people to ask 'how did you do that' and to have to answer 'I have no idea, sorry'. Basically I'm just playing in the mud, the kind that gets hard. If you go to the cement/hypertufa forum, there is a lot of information there about how to do just about everything. There are many leaf-makers on that forum. Everyone has his/her own style. My favorite part is the painting. I can spend an hour painting one small leaf. I get a bit hyperfocused.

Speaking of this weekend, is it still on? Hostajim posted to that thread and it looks like L and L are possibly not expecting us. That would be a shame because if like cement, they are the go-to guys.

I saw a thread about leaf-making on the hypertufa site, so I assumed that was what people were using. I'll look around to see if I can't find a workshop or something. I'd love to plan a trip down to see your garden and studio some day if you're interested in showing off . . .

I'm not going this weekend. I'd love to go, but I'm scared that I'd spend money. Maybe next time . . .

Katie-
I would be happy to share one or two of my hazels in hopes of helping your hazels get "nuts!" Heheheheheh :0) We get tons of nuts. It is hilarious to watch the squirrels get them of the trees. We have one very smart little dude, he/she hangs onto the branch and gets it shaking like crazy to get the nuts to drop and then runs down onto the ground to retrieve them. Most of the "nut rats" take the nuts off one at a time, but not this little fella!

I'm not scared I'm going to spend money this weekend. I KNOW I'm going to spend money this weekend. Money I likely don't have. But whatever.
You can come down anytime to see the garden and my little studio. There isn't much to see studiowise, it's really small, but I have some cool leaves. I'm getting as many cast as I can before winter sets in.
There are loads of directions on the cement/tufa forum. Really there are not that many tricks to this in terms of making the leaves themselves. I think if you want to do it, you should just dive in. What's the worst that can happen? I've thrown about 100 leaves away myself because a lot of it is trial and error. The cost is negligible. But then, the process is half the fun for me.

Hey Rachie . . . thanks so much. I'd love to put another hazelnut in and see if it makes the difference. Let me see . . . I have tons of trees to swap if you're interested in that - little Washington Hawthornes, native Betula, Colorado Blue Spruce, Mountain Ash - do any of those interest you?

Pixy - you're so right. One of the biggest difficulties I have with anything is just getting started. I tend to be a "top-down" person with everything I do, meaning that I need to understand all of it and how it fits together before I'm brave enough to take a stab. That really doesn't do anything for you in the world of art. :-) So it's a lifelong challenge that I'm "working on". I have found some instructions and I'm figuring out what I need and where'll I'll work. I think I'll start with something small and actually finishing it should get me going.

Oh Lord! If I had to understand how everything was going to turn out before I started, I would never get anything done. But there is a downside to everything. The fact that I dive in where angels fear to tread without looking back also
means that I can never hire anyone to help me with projects like, say, putting in a 4000 gallon pond. I would have to tell them how it was supposed to look when it was finished and how things were supposed to be put together. Since I never know how things are going to look, I have to do them myself. You see, that really IS a downside. And it makes for one tired body, to be sure. Also it makes it really hard to tell people how things are done unless I keep notes. It's also hard for me to replicate anything exactly the same way unless I keep notes. And I don't generally keep notes because I don't think about it until I am well into the project. Or photographs either. Some people call it Attention Deficit Disorder. I call it creative.

Funny. I procrastinate because I need to understand everything, but my ADD doesn't let me be patient enough to figure it out. So when I start, I'm usually where I would have been had I dived in like you do.

Same result, really, as with you. It just takes me a little while longer to get started . . .

LOL!! What a pair we would be!!

Kinda scary thought, aint it? :-)

Check this out. Guess which way "my" girl is spinning? http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22535838-5012895,00.html

Katie,
I would love a Washington Hawthorne or two :0)

Oooooh. They have a home. That's great. I'll save two for you. I forgot to say that I also have a couple of Pin Oak, Forsythia and Kerria. Every time I replant something, a little piece "falls off". I'm pretty good at reproduction for an old broad. LOL

Rachie: 2 dogwood, 2 washington hawthorne, 1 forsythia
Tilly: 3 dogwood

Got it.

This message was edited Oct 14, 2007 7:06 AM

Kathy,

Cool link....It's wild watching her switch directions.....

Katie,
Ooooo I would love a forsythia! What are you looking for? Maybe I'l have it :0)

Okay. That's interesting. I saw her go counterclockwise, then moved my eyes to read the blurb. When I looked back, she was going clockwise and she has been for me ever since. My right brain is hanging on for dear life. LOL. And, honestly, that sounds more like me than the left.

Interesting that you can switch back and forth. Wonder how many people can do that?

Rachie, these are small plants, so they will take some to grow up. I'm just happy that they have a home. You should see my yard. Now that I've moved everything out to report and sort, it looks like a nursery!! These poor things need to get into the ground.

The forsythia is yours if you have a home for it. I love that it's one of the first things out in the spring . . .

I have very good home for it, in the new hedgerow that I have started for the wildlife. I love the contrast of the yellow flowers with the brown bark. :0)

I'm so happy - these guys deserve better than sitting in these little pots.

Thanks for giving it a good home.

Hi Kathy, reading the comments below the spinner is interesting.....guess I'm not that weird after all.....(whew...)

Hey Rachie -

I see on the seed swap thread that you have nicotiana. Is it the old fragrant kind? If you have any seeds left over I'd LOVE to have some. I haven't been able to find any plants or seeds with that good fragrance.

Thanks!!

Are you sniffing them at night? Most nicotianas release their scent in the evening.

Could be that in some cases I'm missing them at night. But, in general, what I've seen in the nurseries doesn't refer to their scent at all. And I bought some a few years ago that was a nice, hardy plant, but that never had the scent I remember.

Katie almost everyone right now is carrying N. sylvestris. It has a great fragrance (although not real strong and only in the evenings) and it's the best looking flowers of the nicotianas. What you want though is the N. alata. They're the ones our grandmothers grew.
A little plainer looking than sylvestris but a much more powerful scent. Powerful enough that 1 group planting can strongly perfume your yard and probably part of your neighbor's. :)

This message was edited Oct 15, 2007 11:53 PM

Katy-
I will bring you a pack of seeds. The scent is amazing in the evening, when you walk past them it nearly knocks you over! Rachel