Brad's Tropical Paradise

I just tried out my new Kimo hedge trimmer today, and I like it. I have a small garden, and no need for large, heavy tools. If you're a pro, this tool isn't for you. It's small and light. For size reference, that's my miniature dachshund there sniffing it, and her legs are approx. 1 1/2 inches long. Another reason that I bought this brand is that I already have the leaf blower, and they both use the same charger. So now I have a spare battery, and charger, and I don't have to mess with setting up another charger. I'll never be using the leaf blower and the hedge trimmer at exactly the same time, so it's perfect for me. There is something new that took some getting used to for me. It's a safety feature, and since my last hedge trimmer I bought about twenty years ago, I understand why they do this - it requires two hands to keep the blades running. That is, you have to hold the top handle while you depress the trigger. With my old hedge trimmer I could swi...

In addition to having a lot of plants, the Tropical Paradise, which is what I call my backyard garden here in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix), has a lot of rocks. Most of them are there just to give a nice background to the plants, and not attract a lot of attention, but I do have some petrified wood, which I've always found fascinating. I'll tell you what I know. These rocks have been in the garden now for over twenty years, and other than knowing that they were given to me by a friend, all I know is that they're probably from the Triassic Era, which is when the huge petrified forest in Arizona, just north of me, was growing. That would mean that when they were actually live growing trees (conifers, by the way), they grew on Pangea, the giant supercontinent that existed before everything broke up to make the continents that we know now, about 200 million years ago. Dinosaurs did exist back then, but nothing like the ones that I used to draw when I was a kid. When d...

Last night I decided to relax, so I poured myself a beer into a frosted glass, and sat in the garden to simply enjoy the wonderful evening. And then I noticed that my design needed some refinement for the uplighting. I had done some trimming during daylight hours, and found that the uplighting seemed to just be pointed mostly at at a rock and some dirt, so I moved an agave, specifically the one there on the left. It was OK where it was, and in daylight the composition seemed just fine. But when the sun started going down, I saw that the light, while hitting the cycad very nicely, was just lighting a rock and some dirt when it should have been highlighting the beautiful little agave. Moving an agave is easy, but it can be dangerous, so I put on my heavy-duty gauntlet gloves, got it started out with a small shovel, and gently lifted it out. I put it where the rock was, after having dug a bit more down, and added some fresh potting soil. It didn't take very long, and I was able to get...