Hello fellow gardeners! I salute you again and stop by to share some of the latest events in the backyard. It seems like all I do sometimes is whine and complain about the negative stuff happening in my garden, and I trust me, I don't consider myself to be a negative person, but this time again I'm going to show you a couple of tragedies that have kept me so little bit disappointed during these last days concerning my plants.
First, one day I walked out to water the plants in the morning before going to my job and my strawberry plants (2) had disappeared. They were destroyed and I was excited before that because they were so close to starting forming the fruits.
I thought this could be a one-event situation, a big mistake from me to think because I did not move the other plants that were around the strawberries, and a couple of days later I found out two of my tiny lemon trees, three Japanese medlar seedlings, and the bell pepper plant were also destroyed. I placed the survivors on top of a wooden pallet so maybe the thing that was destroying all my dreams couldn't catch them.
I went to my job in rage wondering "what can be doing this? I don't see any bugs crawling on top of the plants, no worms, caterpillars, or locusts. Talking to my boss, she is a native Argentinian so she was completely and 100% sure that all of this was the making of black ants. These ants are nocturnal, and most of them go out in the middle of the night to collect leaves from each plant that they can find, to take it back to their colony, where they grow fungi apparently or they cultivate a louse, which is actual food.
I went home very tired from a long day so I forgot to stop by the local gardening shop that day and then went to bed without knowing that the next victims would be my small roses. I just recently showed you with excitement how I got new roses, and now both the old rose, the red one, and the new ones, yellow, their leaves are completely gone.
I have been trying to find out ecological ways to combat the ants before they tear to pieces the last one of my plants. If any of you know of something effective and not harmful to the soil, my pets, birds, please leave it in the comments, I will appreciate it.
The fall of a Giant.
Ever since I moved here, there was this huge plant at the end of the backyard. It looks like a palm but is not entirely so. I found out the name of the species is Yucca gloriosa, and despite it looks like it has been growing there for many years, it forms huge flowers, in which a thick stick contains hundreds of white petals. It is very beautiful to the eye but is not such a good evolutionary trait, because those flowers were the doom of the plant.
This city is not called Buenos Aires (good winds in Spanish) for nothing. Sometimes there are strong winds accompanied by heavy rain, and that was the case last weekend, which caused the flower of the plant to completely tear down, breaking the huge and heavy part containing the leaves. I saw in shock how it happened, and I had no other choice than to retire the huge piece from there.
Still, the plant had another two ramifications with a bouquet full of leaves, and the next day, another one fell too by the weight of the flower and the water because of the rain.
I cut the flower stick that was attached to the fallen part containing the leaves, and I thought about collecting the petals to make something out of it.
On a more positive note, my Aloe is thriving, maybe because of the rain, it is getting greener and bigger each day.
In my walks with the dogs, I always detail the flowers, plants, seeds that are around, from the trees, and other gardens nearby. Last weekend I saw a lady pruning a big Jade plant, and some branches were on the ground. When I was a child, we used to live in an apartment, so no Garden, but a small balcony where we only had a big Jade, and some peppermint. Every time someone complimented my mother about the Jade, she used to say that she barely paid attention to it and that it was there when we arrived and it was going to be there when we leave, and sometimes she would cut a branch of it and tell people that if they put it in contact with humid soil for a couple of weeks, it surely would produce a new plant.
I do believe that this is one of those plants indeed that from a branch, can form a new individual, so I scratched a bit the edges from the low apex of the branches, and I placed them on rich wet soil, and I have been watching at them carefully to see if it works and they survive, and if that's the case I will place them on the soil, where it can grow as much as they please.
Small flowering plants that I bought, failed to thrive in the place where I put them before in the garden, so I took out the remains of them and placed them in a pot, and they seem to be doing just fine there because, after 6 days only, they began to produce tiny white flowers.
Tomatoes are also growing steadily, bearing a couple of fruits, while I wait impatiently for them to be ready to reap. The one who’s in love with the wall is growing slowly but steadily, and inside my arboretum, some seedlings are emerging because of the constant humidity and rain, and I think that those small greens are the birches that I sowed a couple of months ago. After the devastation of the ants, those seedlings represent hope for me.
Each plant that I sow and watch growing feels like a pet to me, and when things like this happen that some ants wipe them entirely or they die, I feel kinda blue. Maybe that is why I am constantly sowing new things because with trees for example, from hundreds of seeds that I sow, many will not sprout, and then from the ones that do, the seedlings are very fragile things and very susceptible to bugs, the weather conditions, and disease.
That was all for now. To all of you who are in the northern hemisphere, I wish you can execute your gardening plans perfectly when spring comes, which is very soon because I love to see your gardens. To the ones in the southern hemisphere like me, it soon will start to get rainy, shadier, and colder, so maybe we will find new plants to work with, or just help the ones we already have survive till December properly. Last but not least, to the ones in the tropics, like my fellow Venezuelans and Asians where it is always green and water runs plenty, I wish you to continue being healthy and focused on your many garden plans.
I almost forgot about nominating people to the contest. I hope that they are ok with me tagging them along, so I would like to invite two amazing hivers that I recently discovered and liked very much: 
César.