Holy crow this was a hot week!  Today was the worst, too. Heat index hit 101. Yuck.  I keep biking earlier and earlier in the day and still end up really sweaty.  But, at least I am getting in the exercise.

I *still* have not gotten my new computer set up with work.  I emailed tech support to set up a time, who said to call, and then I just got voice mail.  So I left a voice mail message yesterday, which they didn’t return and then sent another email which went unanswered.  And now it is the weekend.  This frustrates me to no end.  I have my stuff all ready to go.  I have my text expander installed, my medical dictionary and spellcheckers.  I also installed Word 2003 – yes, 2003. That is the version we have to use.  I am just hoping the old computer hangs on long enough until tech support decides to work with me.  I tell you, if I could just get the software myself and install it I would LOL!  I am trying really hard not to be annoyed, but I think it is a bit late for that.

This computer is a touch screen computer, too.  I am doing surprisingly well with that.  Usually I have all kinds of trouble with touch screens, so this is encouraging.  I don’t have to use the touchscreen on the computer, but I have been playing with it.  I do have to get used to typing on a bigger keyboard and I make typing errors, which can be amusing.  I want to practice on it a lot so when (EVER) I get it set up for work it won’t be as hard an adjustment.  All this technology and I *still* do not have a smart phone 😀  I’m just cheap.

 

Anyhoo – you all aren’t coming here on a Friday for me to talk about work – it’s flower time!  My garden is pretty much in its glory time right now.  Freshly edged last weekend on the only cooler day.

My garden is very informal. Kind of a cottage garden, I guess.  I didn’t really have a plan when I made this garden other than the general shape and my anchor plants (the butterfly bush, burning bush, and rose bushes).

Most of you know I have been specialty cone flower obsessed the last couple years.

I have a couple white swan standard cone flowers:

 

Unfortunately, my globe thistle didn’t come back this year, which is one of my favorite flowers along side these cone flowers.  Here is a seedling, though.

 

I hope that will bloom next year.  I seem to have trouble getting my globe thistles to stay.

Here is a closeup of the milkshake:

 

The razzmatazz:

 

Liatris (gay feather)

 

Bees love the liatris!

More of the heirloom lily buds are opening.  These are so cool!  It’s like a bow.  A beautiful little package 😀

Tippy pots – number 1:

 

These pots sunk down a little because they are plastic and the stick shows through. Lesson learned.

Tippy pot number 2:

 

I have a few buds on the rose bushes.  Time for a small flush.

2 of the bushes are getting black spot like last year.  These really humid spells seem to do them in.  I need to spray with some baking soda this weekend to see if I can halt the disease.

Lots o’ black eyed Susans now.

 

I think next week I will be able to show off the butterfly bush, too!  Aren’t you excited?  Then maybe I will actually get some butterflies to come around…

Hopefully some good solo riding this weekend as John is gone.  Maybe not Saturday as it will be in the mid 80s and stormy as the front moves through, but who knows?

Have a great weekend!

I thought I would show you pictures from a garden tour I took today.  My garden club met for this month to view the garden of one of our members.  I had serious envy of both the house and gardens!

We had our meeting on the deck:

 

Which overlooks this pool:

 

I know, right???

Then we were taken on a tour.  The owner did all her own garden design by trial and error. She did not know anything about gardening when she started.  

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This is a jackmani clematis:

 

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My garden is so tiny compared to this one!  I wish I had that much property 😀

I’ll end with a shot of my front bed.

 

I still love it 😀

Saturday is cupcake riding!  Woo Hoo!

 

 

 

 

 

Seems like we swung into summer with a vengeance. Lots of heat and humidity and a *lot* of rain. It has  rained pretty much every day for the last few weeks!

Butterfly weed:

Haven’t seen any butterflies yet, though.

The hot papaya cone flower has a lot of blooms now:

The razzmatazz has one bloom on it so far.  This is my oldest plant.  It has to be 8 years old now.

This is one of my new lilies that I planted last fall.  It is a hardy Orienpet from John Scheepers:

Maybe a foot and a half tall.  This is Anastasia:

It is just lovely and smells so good!!   I need to find more room for these.

The old fashioned day lilies are also in full flower:

 

These are a good 4+ feet tall!

It’s amazing to me that the blooms only last a day. They are so prolific that you would never notice that.

Knockout rose bush:

I have a few black-eyed susans here and there.

These sprout all over the place and I move them around to a bare spot and see if they take.

Lots of cone flowers getting ready to bloom!

Have a wonderful weekend. We have some hot bike riding to do 😀

I am on my way to Becoming an Outdoors Woman!  However, couldn’t leave you without showing the blooms 😀

It’s officially summer, so I changed out my my flag:

 

Not too many butterflies yet, mostly the little white and yellow sulfurs. Once my cone flowers and butterfly bush are blooming, I hope to get many, many butterflies like I had last year.

I planted a new rose bush in the extended bed, which you can barely see because it is so small:

This will get much bigger in the next year or two.  It is blooming, though!

Isn’t that a gorgeous color?

Time to cut the alliums down. I left them up because they were interesting, but I will cut them down when I get back. They are starting to really turn brown.

 

A couple of the old-fashioned daylilies are open.

 

The hot papaya echinacea is ruffing out more (for lack of a better word).

It has more blooms, too!

 

One thing I love about the echinacea is the long bloom time.

Progress on the walkway.  We bought a sledgehammer to get the last broken block up.

John carted all the pieces to the the side of the house, put a picture of them on craigslist offering them for free – and someone came and took them all!   It was hundreds of pounds of concrete, too. That saved us dump fees for that, plus helped the environment!  Hopefully he will be able to get some new cement down if this rain would ever quit.

Liatris is getting close to blooming.  I love all stages of this plant. It looks cool  all throughout the growing season.

 

One last look at the astilbes.  Here is the shade garden from the side.  There are 2 new rows behind the white ones that I showed last week. You can see how much catching up they have to do 😀

 

Not sure who the brilliant person is who put the metal sundial in the shade garden, though.   🙄

Porch view:

 

Have a great weekend everyone!  I will be trying to stay dry with my outdoor activities.  BOW is still fun, rain or shine!

 

Another Friday post.  That was a rough work week.  Phew. Doesn’t look to get better any time soon, either, unfortunately.

One thing that always makes me happy and relieves stress? My garden!  Just looking at it makes me happy.

I moved my birdbath from the side shade bed to the middle of the front and really like it there.  It even got a good scrubbing  😳

 

The sun drops are starting to open up.  They got pretty beaten down by all the rain this week, so I might need to prop them up.

 

There are lots of buds, though.

 

I have some self seeding snapdragons.

I don’t remember what the original color of the parents were several years ago, but each year I get different colors from the seeds that spread.  I deadhead these right into the bed and let them go wherever they want.

My first coneflower opened up as well.  The hot papaya!

This plant always sends out one early bud and then it will be July for the rest. Not sure why that happens.

John got a lot of the walkway cleared out.

 

We need to rent a jackhammer for this last section. Whomever poured the concrete actually poured it over the old sidewalk underneath so there are 2 layers stuck together and they won’t break up.

My garden path on the edge to nowhere:

 

Scentimental rose bush with tons of blooms.

 

Here is progress on one of the tippy pots.  These are pink wave petunias with some lobelia on the bottom.

 

I saw a couple ladies walking by and pointing towards the garden, and I bet this is what they were pointing at.

Campanulas:

 

These are small mounds of foliage that send up long flower stalks.  I moved these last fall and they seem to like this new spot.

 

I have all my potted plants on the back stoop.  I shopped the discount rack at Lowe’s and found some  dahlias for $3.  Score!  They didn’t have blooms on them (which is probably why they were on sale), but you just wait a bit and you get them.

 

Such a cool color, too.

Pixie was watching me from the back door while I was taking these pictures.

 

She wants outside so bad!

Finally got the burning bush trimmed.  We planted this 5 or 6 years ago as a small gallon plant and look at it today!

 

It actually was growing over the path.  This is the first time we have ever trimmed it.

 

It’s bloomin’ time, that’s for sure!

 

Welcome to Friday and What’s Blooming!  There was the tulip phase and now it’s the rose phase!

“Es ist ein Ros entsprungen”

My Sunsprite, aka 100-pound rose bush, has at least a couple dozen buds on it.

Next week will be the big bloom week for it. Look at all those buds!

Neon pink Knockout rose:

And my other uber favorite rose – the Scentimental.

This one also has probably 40 buds on it.

The smell so dreamy, too.

The alliums are still going strong.  This is a very cool flower.

These are some annuals called Wishbone flowers.  Not sure why, but they are cute and so I got some for one of my planters.

 

I also have a surprise bloom on some new flowers I have in the garden.  I got 2 kinds of centaura (aka perennial bachelor buttons)  that I planted as young plants, so I wasn’t expecting any blooms this year.  Then I see this!

 

This one is called Amethyst in Snow and I love it!  They are short plants and are at the front of my bed.  I don’t know if the other one will bloom or not.

Still have more of the irises blooming.

 

This weekend will be some shopping for a couple stepping stones and then either a birdbath or obelisk or gazing ball thing for the middle of the garden.

 

Now that I expanded the bed, it needs something in the middle.

Here is my shade garden.

 

I have new astilbes planted underneath the window and they need a season or 2 to get to full size.

I have some fun new flowers to show you this week.  I was worried that these were going to open up and be spent during our vacation, but they were very slow at opening.

First off are my bleeding hearts.  These got a lot bigger.  The 2 plants are on each side of my bowling ball!

 

Not sure if I ever told the story of the bowling ball.  It came from my first flip house.  There was junk in the home still when I bought it – although the bank cleaned most of it out upon request.  However, the bowling ball was still in there and struck me  as funny for some reason.  My MIL has bowling balls in her garden and I thought they were fun, so I kept this as a memento of that house.

These are so pretty!

Near these in the shade garden are the lily of the valleys.  One of my favorites.

 

These spread like crazy.  Found them in the lawn this year.

I had some tulips left, like the purple passion:

 

You can see the queen of the nights and the fringe tulips in the background as well.  As of today, these are all done.  The petals all fell off during the week with all the rain.

Snow Queen clematis opened up!

This plant has been in my garden for 5 years now, I think, and it never really gets bigger.  It sends out a lot of flowers, but not much in the way of greenery.

Now the new ones!  A couple of years ago, I got some iris rhizomes from my neighbor.  We didn’t know what color they were or anything.  Well, I had put them in a spot that was too shady and they never bloomed.  So when I expanded the garden bed last fall, I moved those irises over and voila! I have blooms!

 

I don’t know much about iris, so I don’t even know what kind this is.

 

They obviously love this new spot because there is a ton of buds.

The other new plant is an allium.  These are members of the onion family and are bulbs.  The flowers don’t smell like onions, though 😀

 

Aren’t they fun?  They remind me of fireworks for some reason.

 

I actually have another variety of these that are going to bloom soon.  I must get more of these bulbs!

I also need to move my tippy pots.  I first put them in bare ground in early spring:

 

I kind of forgot how much this would fill in.  Now it looks like this!

 

Oops!  The daylilies aren’t even close to their size, either.  So, I will have to move this over to the left.

I really wanted to get into the garden this weekend to much and weed, but the forecast is for 50s and rainy.  Yuck!  That also means no biking.  Gonna have to find something else for entertainment.

Friday – yay!  What a nice day as well.  I made an executive decision to work a half day day and put in a half day on Saturday so I could enjoy some good weather since Saturday is supposed to be rainy.  As stressful as my job can get at times- you can’t beat being able to make decisions like that.

Here is a quick shot of breakfast because it was so tasty!

Coconut flour waffles with apple/cranberry topping.  Who needs to go out for breakfast?  Okay, I like to go out for breakfast sometimes…

Now right to the flowers:

The garden has loved all of this warm weather.  Cool front on the way, but things soaked up the sun!

New items this week:

One lonely little Princess Irene.  The only one that came back this year.

Golden Parade:

 

Purple passion:

Kings blood.  These are really tall, too. they come up over my knees.

This is a fringed tulip called Aleppo.   First time I have ever planted a fringe.

Pretty neat! Kind of reminds me of a venus flytrap

A few of the shirley tulips came back.  These are the ones that start white and fade to purple.  This is the same plant a few days apart.

 

I do love that one.

All the late tulips are blooming now including the queen of the night and maureen.

I like the tuxedo look of these black and whites together.

 

The yellow monte carlo tulips are on their last legs, but still going strong.

 

I can’t believe these are tulips!  I lucked out with the combo of the Christmas marvel and these together.  They bloomed at the same time and lasted together.

 

I spy empty space there, too, in the back.  Time to go plant shopping!  My red hot pokers didn’t come back after I transplanted them there.

My alliums are starting to open.  I hope these don’t bloom and die next week while we are not here to see them.  Doesn’t it look like some alien eye?

Bleeding hearts are starting to unfurl:

 

And lilacs!  I brought these into the house.  These are actually from the neighbor’s bush.

 

Lot’s and lots of flowers now!

 

Not much biking on tap this weekend as it is supposed to be rainy tomorrow, but maybe I can squeak a short ride in before it rains.

 

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

It’s tulip time around Casa Radiance!!  Last week one tulip opened – now a lot of them.  These are all the early and mid season tulips.

Seeing these makes me SO HAPPY!!!

Apricot Dreams:

 

Christmas Marvel:

 

This is a double tulip.  It looks almost like a rose.  Monte Carlo:

 

When it’s sunny, these open way up like this.  They are very fragrant, too. I paired them with the Christmas Marvel:

 

Who says pink and yellow don’t go together??

 

Then the Pink Impression – these are very tall.

 

 

The fritillaria.  I really like these, but the bulbs are expensive and they are finicky.  3 planted, one came up.  Same as last year.  Not buying any more.  This plant was a big hit with the garden club that met at my house today.

 

 

More hyacinths opened up:

 

Pretty

 

I planted alliums for the first time and they have sent up buds.  I can’t wait to see these (and show them to you)!

 

I did my tippy pot demonstration for the garden club.  It’s too early for the annuals to be ready for planting (other than pansies), so these are empty.  I have a set of plastic ones in the front and the terracotta ones on the side.

 

So cool!  I can’t wait until these are full of flowers.  I actually might take the pots off and paint them first.  ‘Cause I need another project…

 

No time this weekend, though.  Beautiful weather on tap and I feel a bike binge coming on!  😀

For real!  A what’s blooming post!  It finally feels like spring around here.  Finally.  The garden is changing every day now.  I note from last year that we are about 2 weeks behind.

I can’t remember what kind of tulips these are.  Early species – I think?

The close up at night and open in the sun.

Hyacinths!  These are new this year.  There are 3 colors coming up, but only 2 are open right now.  The purple:

and the pink:

Lots of buds on the tulips, too.  My garden club comes over next Friday and I will have blooms for them!  Yay!  I am doing the tippy pot demo and I can only show the structure because it is too early for any plants to be available to actually put in the pots (other than pansies).  At least there will be some color.

This guy will probably be blooming:

This is the fritillaria.  I really like these, but they are expensive and just not hardy at all.  3 bulbs planted last year and 1 came up.  So, I replaced the 2 that didn’t come up and only 1 came up this year.  Lame!

I can’t wait to see the flowers open.   I shall show you my inner geek here.  I have a map for my garden. It’s done to scale, too.  😳

 

You can see the line where the old bed border was and the new front curve I put in last fall.  I just never bothered to erase the old line LOL!

Of course, I made notes to myself about where to put the new bulbs last fall.

 

I am really not sure why I thought I would be able to decipher this come spring…

At least it’s fun guessing.  I know what I bought – I just don’t remember where they went!