Update on plants

Somehow, I have managed to remember to water my patio plants at least three times per week during this hot summer, and have even given them some Phostrogen once a week. Most of them have survived pretty well, to my surprise.

Not that it's all been a bed of roses (so to speak). The bi-coloured bougainvillea, which was doing so well only a month ago, has lost most of its bracts:


I suspect this may be because I had the not-so-bright idea of moving it a little, so that it was directly underneath the outlet pipe for my study air conditioner. I thought this would be an excellent way of saving water, if it went directly onto a plant. I forgot, temporarily, that bougainvilleas like to be pretty dry, or at least to dry out between waterings. Steady dripping through most of the day wasn't good for it.

So I moved it back to where it was, and then nearly killed it by forgetting about it completely for a week - it's not with the other plants - until I spotted the leaves withering and yellowing. But a bit of water has revived it, thankfully.

More puzzling: last year we bought two flowering succulents. They're not mesembryanthems, which have daisy-like flowers, but we don't know what they are. Anyway,they provided a lovely display of colour for a couple of months last summer, then died away somewhat.

I treated them exactly the same through the winter. Then one of them started coming back to life, and the other stayed dormant. Here's the one that survived:


I didn't bother to take a photo of the other one. We should probably replace it, but somehow time has rushed by this summer.

I wrote this post about plants just over a year ago. Of those plants, the lavender didn't survive very long at all. I don't know what went wrong with them. The cuttings (geraniums and bougainvillea) from our old house didn't survive either. Probably it was the wrong time of year.

But the two hibiscus plants, although they looked a bit frail over the winter, seem to be doing well:


And this one - a palm of some type, or perhaps a yucca - is doing amazingly well! It's even producing extra plantlets from the base:


For some reason I didn't post a photo of this one at the time, but it's also doing extremely well. I believe its name is mother-in-law's tongue:


My petunias aren't doing brilliantly - but then again, it's the first year that I've had any petunias survive beyond about the end of May. They're still flowering somewhat, and seem to be producing little baby petunias. It will be interesting (to me, anyway) to see what happens to them:


As for the new plants we bought in April they all seem to be doing very well. The fig tree still has about five small figs, too hard to pick, but perhaps they'll be ready later in the year. Or even next year, since I seem to recall that figs take a LONG time to ripen.


The two larger plants are doing well too, although not much different from when we bought them. The eugenia seems healthy:


So does the other plant, whose name we still don't know.


What particularly surprises me about all these plants is that they're in direct sunshine for most of the morning,including the very hottest part of the day. Yet they all seem to be thriving.

So far, anyway!