Garden Siren Call

The sansevieria at top is divided. The photo from it on the porch is before it was divided.        My father, Emery Cox Jr., passed away in 1989. It was a shock, of course, and we received many plants at his visitation and funeral.     One of the green gifts was a  sansevieria, also called a Snake Plant or "Mother-in-Law's Tongue." I took this and planted it in a pot. You can see from the photo that it has grown like Topsy over the years.     I knew I had to divide it this year, so a few weeks ago, my husband Steve and I wrestled the giant sansevieria on the porch over to the driveway.     It really didn't take long: I picked out part of the huge plant, and placed the other in one of those heavy paper yard bags, Boom! All done!      Sansevieria is actually native to the African country of Madagascar. It's in the genus of Dracaena.     My plant does bloom, because it is located in a bright but indirect light...

  This is how the culvert looks now. Here's how it looked before.      Last week, my husband brought up a topic I had forgotten.       "Have you weeded the culvert?" Steve asked. I replied that I ran my small weed wacker in that area of the yard. But pulling weeds? No.     "Could you?" he asked, hopefully. Well, sure. That's what I do, after all, pull weeds all over our big yard.    This project actually went pretty smoothly. In about two hours I'd pulled all the weeds, cleaned off and replaced rocks, and got rid of the debris.      What is a culvert? According to The  Constructor.org , a culvert is made up of various materials, such as aluminum, steel or concrete, and generally runs underneath or near a road to provide a place for drainage, or to run cables.       The culvert near our house was put in place several years ago by Scott County, Iowa.       Before this so...