Why I Oughta...

We've been growing Sweet Potato Vines for the better part of ten years.  Basically ever since I started to buy and plant containers of my own, we've found a home for one of these.  Or six of them.  With their rock-bottom price (usually $0.99 a piece), I naturally grab one of these and a spike or two and check the box on the "spill" and "thrill" in the fill-spill-thrill container philosophy trio. But in all of that time, I have never had a Sweet Potato Vine flower.  Until now.  And I have not one vine flowering, but two!  In two different containers .   Here, below, you can see both of the wine barrel containers that I used on our patio and you can see that both of them have a very healthy/robust purple sweet potato vine and both are flowering! (also note how happy the Lemon Coral Sedum is, eh?) The flowers are quite striking and add some drama to the normally boring vine. From this DIYNetwork post , it turns out that the reason I...

All the way back in April, I was given a Chicago-Hardy Fig Tree for my birthday by my sister Vic and Equation Boy/Man.  I somehow, failed to post about the tree all the way until I did this recent patio planter/container round up earlier this month .  In that post, I showed the first look at the Chicago-hardy fig tree that is in a yellow container . Today, you can see in the photo above the first fig that is coming to fruit.  There are three or four of these figs that are starting to grow, so maybe come late Summer, we'll have a little fig harvest. As the name implies, this fig tree is cold hardy for our zone.  The full description is here .  With this being in a container, I'm thinking that I can move it to the garage or screened porch to provide it a little bit of winter cover with the hope that it comes back to life next Spring after living through the hard frost.  Since this is in a container, I'm not counting it in the list of trees planted at H...