The garden is busy, busy, busy right now. Making up for lost time, I guess 🙂

Lots of balloon flowers:

The pink ones open a little later for some reason. They are right next to each other, too.

Liatris, aka gayfeather:

Now is the time for coneflowers:

Those are Cheyenne Spirit. If I were to recommend a coneflower that you should get, it would be that one. You never know which of the colors it will be and sometimes more than one color per plant. I have lots of babies from the original three that I bought. I gifted some and let others just grow where they sprouted.

Loved by bees:

Supreme cantaloupe, which is kind of small this year:

Campanula rebloom:

My Annabelle hydrangea is doing nicely:

This should double in size for next year if all goes according to plan (haha – do gardens ever do that??). These big blooms don’t droop over since the stems are nice and thick.

Black-eyed Susan:

That’s one plant! In its third year. Another hydrangea behind that, which is just starting to bud out.

It’s baby bird time right now. With having feeders and a relatively safe place for birds, we often see lots of babies. Right now there are goldfinch and chickadee babies. Here is one of the chickadee babies looking to take a dip in our water feature.

Baby chickadees are adorable. They look just like the adult only tiny. They don’t fly very well and kind of bump into things. Plus they aren’t really afraid and will often come pretty close to us when we sit on the patio.

The gooseneck loosestrife that I moved when we put in the water feature has really taken hold. I started with something like 6 of these?

Yikes! They can be invasive, so I’m not really planning on putting them anywhere else. The blooms line up and point to the sun like little soldiers:

Bee Balm:

Another one that went crazy. I started with a one gallon pot and now I’m going to have to thin this patch.  I think of Raggedy Ann when I see the blooms:

Not to mention the bees go crazy for this plant. There were quite a few bumblebees on it this evening when I took these pictures.

Another bee favorite is the drumstick allium:

These had actually flopped way over and were almost touching the ground, so John and I wrestled to put a hoop around them – all while the bees were trying to eat lunch. Eeek! Making a mental note to put a cage around these early.

White swan and magnus coneflowers next to my globe thistle:

At our old house, I had a perfect placement of the globe thistle and coneflowers. They bloomed at the same time and looked so cool together. They aren’t timing right at this house. Not sure I will ever get that combo duplicated again.

My old friend the Razzmatazz coneflower:

Weather should be decent this weekend. However, my bike is in the shop. I don’t know what happened, but after I cleaned my bike, the rear wheel started making a grinding noise. I don’t know how I could have done something to the inside ball bearings by cleaning it since I didn’t have the wheel even off the bike, but there you go. Could just be coincidence.  Flat tires I can fix, but wheel problems I cannot. Anyway, I dropped the wheel off at the bike shop on Tuesday and they aren’t even going to get to look at it until Saturday. Boo!!  So, the plan will be for a hike instead.

Have a great weekend!