This spring and coming into summer has been about the perfect weather for a garden.  Lots of sun and afternoon rain.  Now a heat wave and the plants are soaking it up!

The daylilies have sprung to life.  I need to cull some of these because they spread like wildfire!

They actually do really well in the shade.  At least this old-fashioned one does.

My newest plant is the Hot Papaya echinacea.  How cool is this color?

I love it!  There is just the 1 bloom on this, but it is a young plant.  I am obsessed with the ruffed coneflowers.

My oldest friend is back.  I always say how I love certain plants in the garden, but more what I mean is the type of plant it is.  However, I do have a couple of plants which I am very fond of as ‘individuals’.  One is the yellow rose, obviously, as it has meaning outside of the garden.  The other one is this echinacea.

The razzmatazz.  It’s because I have had it for 8 years now.  I actually moved with this plant.  Dug it right out of the ground and carted it from Illinois to NY.

It’s like an old friend and has a personality.  Perennials can last a long time, but not really forever, and every year I check to see if this one will be back for another round.

Cheery galliardas.

One white swan coneflower has opened up.  The rest are getting ready.

You can’t see my garden sign anymore!

All these coneflowers are tall this year.  Almost everything is taller this year than in other years, with the exception of the butterfly bush and my heliopsis clematis – which normally are the huge plants in my garden. Go figure.

The sweet potato vines are doing well.

The actually had a couple of small light purple blooms on them, which was cool.  I didn’t know they flowered.  I hope more pop up so I can get a picture of them.

Those stubby plants are some nictotiana silvestris.  I tried growing these from seed last year and failed.  This year I managed to get about 6 to live (at least so far). They needed a lot of babying, which I am not so good about with indoor seedlings.  Hopefully they will grow big and tall like they are supposed to.  Better hurry up!

Green and flower filled post today.  No drought here.  I was wondering if we were going to have a dry time since we had hardly any snow this winter, but the spring rains certainly made up for it.

A few evening shots of the garden.

This is right up against the porch:

The butterfly weed is opening up.  I think it is a little early, too.

Bright orange and it gets a lot of interest from bees and butterflies (and aphids)

I have several colors of coneflowers that are getting ready to bloom.  One has opened – the Green Envy

Sundrops in full flower:

These are cute and delicate.

The astilbes I talked about last week are fully in bloom now.

They look like white starbursts, don’t they?

I am tempted to rip up some of the day lillies and have more of these in different colors.

Speaking of the day lilies  – they are really, really tall.

That’s pretty much eye level – so you know they are 5 feet tall.

Here is a nice sunny shot of the garden while I was eating lunch on the porch today.

Now the sundrops really live up to their name.

Sunny day and sunny weekend coming up.  Thinking our longest ride of the season coming up, too!

The week comes to a close already.  Our schedules have been all out of sorts this week.  Not in a bad way, but just different.  We ended up biking for a bagel this morning since we didn’t get one on Wednesday.  A nice morning for a ride.  This week the weather has been perfect for the garden.  Sunny mornings and afternoon rain showers and the green has exploded everywhere (including the lawn).

My butterfly bush is pretty short this year.  I wonder if it will get as big as it usually does.

I have a couple new plants.  This is Campanula.

I thought these would be taller, but I love the bell-shaped flowers.

Also just coming into bloom are the oenothera, aka Sundrops.

I will take more pictures when these are all in bloom.  These actually got crisped really badly with some frost because they came up too early, so happy to see they made it. I wanted something with early summer flowers and this and the campanula fit the bill.

One of my potted plants.  This is celosia, which will fill out a lot more.

John liked these when we were flower shopping, so I got them instead of my usual geraniums.

The liatris is getting bigger and bigger.  I love all stages of this plant.

This is the shade garden from the side of the house.  Lots o’ green here and the lilies have thrown up long stalks.

The astilbes are just about in bloom, so you will see close ups of those next week.

Roses are still going crazy.

Found the coolest spider on my scentimental rose bush.

After doing some research, I found out it is a crab spider.  This particular kind can change from yellow to green to the white/pink depending on the plant it is on.  It eats bees. Even the eyes are pink!

Pretty neat!

Made it to Friday!  I did get some good sleep last night, thank goodness.  I went up to read and next thing I know John was taking the book from me that I dropped and turning off the light.  I got almost 8 hours of sleep and felt mucho better today.

My insomnia really has been so much better since I started taking magnesium, so I am not sure where that came from.

Let’s see, goals first or garden first?  Guess I will go with goals.

1.  Continue the Fit Female program. I will finish up Stage 3 next week and move on to the final stage.  I will be dropping down to 2 days a week of lifting because of the increased bike mileage.  That means T/Th lifting schedule and lift only on rainy weekends.

2.  Make and post another guitar video.  Lucky you!  To keep myself working on the guitar (which I have been), I will post another song or two for your listening pleasure 😀

3.  Enjoy my birthday!  It’s next week and I am even taking a day off of work!  44 here I come.

4. Finish paying off credit card debt.  I will be credit card debt free by the end of the month.  I wish student loans would be gone as well, but you take what you can get, right?

5.  Make at least 3 recipes from the bazillion that I have pinned on Pinterest.  I am the queen of pinning and not doing.

Now on to the fun stuff!  The garden is really starting to pop now.

These are dianthus.  I planted these last year as annuals and with the mild winter, they came back!  I love having money saved 😀

This is armeria. I grew these from seed last year, and they sent up volunteers this year, which I was surprised to see and just left them in place.  They are a bit “weedy” looking for me, but I do like the pink.

This is in the part of the garden that I keep messing with and changing around.  It always looks bare and part of that is because it gets late afternoon sun and that’s it.

Hard to find plants that are tall that like that kind of light.  (Other than the yellow clematis).  I think I am going to do some tippy pots here for height.

The bushes on the side of the house (our neighbor’s bushes, really, but they don’t take care of them) are blooming little tiny white flowers that are very fragrant.  Butterflies love them.

Swallowtail – one of my favorites!

Knockout roses.  This thing is amazing.  No scent, but it blooms like crazy and you can’t kill it.

The scentimental rose bush.

I cannot tell you how much I adore this rose bush.  I just love it!  It’s beautiful and very fragrant and pretty easy to care for.  I don’t spray my roses, so it is nice to have ones that are pretty disease resistant, which this is.

The sunsprite bush is also blooming now.

The galliarda are just starting to open up.  These will bloom all summer long into fall.

These are actually in the bare area by the porch, but they aren’t very tall.

It’s the rose time of year – and about time to put down mulch!

It’s Friday and the start of the holiday weekend!  I don’t know if I will be working Monday or not.  Probably not as my clinics are closed, but there might be backup work.

I thought a morning bike ride might be nice before breakfast today, but it was a little drizzly.  I decided to eat breakfast in the hopes it would clear out.

The weather did clear, although it was pretty cloudy.  I figured if I wanted a ride, I would have to just take it.  So after working for a while, I suited up and headed out for a quick ride.  I just biked straight up the main road out of town for 5 miles and then turned around.  Not much out here.

This is a bike lane, but the traffic goes by at 55 mph.  Me no likey.

I actually went out for 2 rides today and got in 22 miles.  I wasn’t expecting that many miles, so I was quite pleased about that.  Thought it was going to rain in the afternoon, but it didn’t, so John and I rode together for some coffee.

Anyway, back to the garden!  Lots and lots of green now.  You can see the remains of some tulips. I let the foliage turn yellow and then cut them down.

The clematis in the back is the one that we call The Clematis that Ate Cleveland because it will climb all the way up the porch and the posts. That’s the yellow one.  Obviously it has a long way to go.

My Snow Queen has bloomed as well.

The blooms are at the bottom, which is interesting.  This winter did some funny stuff to the garden.

The top has buds which haven’t opened yet.  The other multiblue clematis that was open last week dropped it’s petals and just left puffs behind.

The wonderful Boysenberry Buttercup Iris!  Showing it again.

I just got the one stalk of blooms, but it is this plant’s first year, so it will multiply.  This iris has fragrance, too. I got them at Iris Mart.

The other iris has not bloomed and isn’t throwing a stem up, so I don’t know if I need to move it to a sunnier spot or what.  I just need to wait a while since this is my first time with irises.

The roses are just starting to bloom now.  We got a freeze and some of the buds got crisped, like this one:

This is the scentimental. It has a ton more buds on it that will open in the next couple weeks.

The knockout rose popped open today.  Yesterday one little bloom and today a bunch.

Nice to see the little splashes of color.

Potted plants are doing well.

It’s only been a week and the sweet potato vine is already filling in!

You can see the iris just to the right of the rose bush.  Just for perspective.

Have a wonderful Memorial Weekend!  We are having a quiet one with biking and relaxing.

Another week has gone by.  Things are really looking green around here now.  More and more trees are leafed out and we have had to mow the lawn a couple times already. Still a little on the chilly side, but you can’t have everything.

Maureen tulip:

Queen of the night:

The make such a nice combo together.

More teeny daffodils.

One of my clematis (clemati?). This is the Multi Blue.

I moved it to the side of the house to see if it would be more vigorous.  It gets much more sun here, but doesn’t seem all that interested in becoming a real true clematis.

This is Iceland Tulip.  I only got 1 up this year.

I also bought some bleeding hearts a few weeks ago.  I didn’t think I would get any blooms on them this year, but there were a couple!

I love these.

They are in the shade part of the garden.  See how the daylilies are totally overtaking everything?

I have to thin them out.  It’s only May and they are all over the place. If anyone wants any, please let me know and I can dig some up and send them (if okay to your location).  They are the the tall old fashioned orange ones.  The liriope has not come up yet.  Those are late to start in the spring and where the empty spot is 😀

The Shirley tulips are getting darker now:

Getting on the last legs of those.

The passionale tulips are still going strong.  It was hard to take pictures today as it was windy LOL!

I spotted a new bloom coming, too.

This is one of my bearded irises.  A new to me plant.  I have never grown irises before, so I am all excited about that!

Have a great weekend and a Happy Mother’s Day!

More tulips today 😀

I did go to someone’s house today for our monthly garden club meeting.  I have total house envy.  It is newly built in the Adirondacks on a lake.  I am soooo jealous!  I would have taken pictures, but I didn’t want to do that and plaster them on the internet LOL.  She had mostly just stonescaping done as the house is less than a year old, but so pretty.

Instead, I just have photos of my garden today.  Small as it is, I do love it so.

The Passionale have opened up:

I love the deep color of these.

The Shirley tulip.  These are the ones that start out white and the purple gets darker the older the bloom is.

I planted more of those last fall.

The Golden Parade are on their last legs, but I wanted to show you how giant the blooms are on these tulips.  Compared to my hand:

The Queen of the Night have also just started to open up.

These will get even darker.  The white tulips with them are not quite open yet.  They still look a little green.  Next week they will be purty!

Our area has just gotten the wave of Red Admirals coming through.  There are tons and tons of them!  They are all over the lilacs and even just landing on our house.

I have never seen this many butterflies in one place outside of a butterfly conservatory.

And yes, I was all up in their grills 😀  Macro!

This weekend is going to be good weather wise, so we will be ride, ride riding!

Question:  Are you experiencing the Red Admiral wave?

The weekend.  Hooray!!  The weather was truly spring-like this week with very fickle weather.  Windy, rainy, cold with peeks of sun.  Today was just  a walking day for exercise using my 10 minute walks interspersed throughout the day.  No biking in this wind.

Made up a new breakfast:

This is 1/4 cup of part-skim ricotta mixed with 1/4 cup pumpkin, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon of honey and some cinnamon.  Baked for 25 minutes.  Topped with 10 grams of dried cranberries.  This was interesting.  It’s kind of like my ricotta puffs, but with pumpkin and a single serving.  It is sort of like a pumpkin pie, but firmer and not as sweet.

Busy work day today.  Good for a Friday. I buckled right down and busted out a lot of work, which was a nice change from my usual Fridayitis 

I got a little hungry before lunch, so I had a date with crunchy peanut butter.

My old favorite snack is back!  More dates in the house since it is riding season.

Lunch time:

PB flour with a coconut flour biscuit.  Quick and easy.  I wanted to get back to work and continue busting it out.  I did take a 10 minute walk after lunch though.  The garden is blooming nicely now.  The mid season tulips are up.

Princess Irene. I love the 2 tone color on this one:

Golden Parade:

Also, my fritillaria is here.

I actually got 3 bulbs and only 1 came up.  Figures because each bulb was about $5!  Gahhh!!!  The problem was that this part of the garden is a bit of a depression and we had a rainy winter and the water pooled there. Then it froze all the plants with ice instead of just frozen ground.  Not so good.  I did lose a fair number of bulbs this year, but all the more reason to order more!!

Lily of the Valley.  I just adore these!  So tiny, so fragrant.

I worked hard today and finished up all my lines early.  I have a set amount of lines that I like to get per day (since I am paid by the line). My goal is to finish them in a certain amount of time.  Some days when I finish them “early”, I just knock off.  Some days I work in the amount of time I normally do and get the extra lines.  I decided to walk with John to the post office and then do a bit more before dinner.  That was a nice 1.5 mile walk to the post office and back.

Then I did another 30 minutes of work and really called it a day!  All before dinner.  Sweet.  Speaking of:

Baked clam strips.  My day ended up pescetarian.  Not planned.

Another 1/2 mile walk after dinner and I had a little over 3 miles on the day. It feels good to get in that broken up activity and it really hasn’t hurt my work production, so I need to remember that.

I am out of here early and John and I are headed out for a Friday night on the town!