By Victoria Torrey

What a glorious morning! It rained overnight (which is when we all hope it will rain) and the early morning sunshine accentuated the droplets left on all the leaves and flowers. My kind of day, so it’s time to get to work.

First things first. The rainy season has encouraged all kinds of things (besides weeds). The ornamental taro has gone crazy sending out shoots into a drainage ditch that has to be rescued so it won’t overflow. Rescuing the ditch is one thing, finding a place for all those baby black taros is another. No, I don’t want to throw them away, they have to be transplanted somewhere. Usually I have them transplanted along the road – that’s where most transplants go – and we haven’t run out of road yet. We will someday, but not yet.

Then there are the Sanchezia. I’ve mentioned them before; in fact I did a column on “The Sanchezia that ate the yard.” Darn thing got to be 20 feet long, 10 wide and about eight tall rooting wherever a branch touched the ground. It took some doing to get it all tamed, but there are still babies growing up here and there, so they have to be dug and moved. Along the road is a good spot for them since they are both colorful and collectors of hummingbirds and other pollinators. If they want to spread out there, so be it.

Butterfly white and yellow gingers are becoming a problem although the scent of them in bloom is enough for me to want to keep them all, which is not possible. They spread by root running and can take over their assigned space no matter how many times you tell them, “STAY!” Evidently, they speak no English. We have given away hundreds of them and they still come on, pushing other things out of the way. (Sigh)

Lemon grass is another one that we planted deliberately and now have to fight. Someone insisted to me that leaf-cutter ants would not go through lemon grass. HA! It took many months to plant 500 feet of lemon grass around the orchard and more months for it to fill in completely and the ants still eat the leaves from the fruit trees. Now the lemon grass itself is a nuisance, six feet high and four feet wide and needs to be put under control before it decides to take over the orchard it was supposed to protect. If you want lemon grass, come on over and dig some up.

Same goes for the ginger and the taro. Any takers?



Moss can be tricky, slippery and miserable. It can also be one of your best friends. Moss is often the first thing to colonize a rock or a slab of concrete or building stone – or tree trunk. Once it has, it gets to work rooting, growing, catching aerial dust and dirt and depositing it on its roots building up a little pile of soil where other things can take root. I don’t know what the two little plants in the picture are, but they are there because of the moss. Mycorrhiza fungus loves to live in moss and you know what that means . . . orchids.



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For more information on this article of request for information about gardening, Ms. Victoria Torley, gardener columnist, can be reached at victoriatorley1@gmail.com

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