It’s Friday!  So glad.  In trying to get this account caught up current, we are each assigned to one person’s dictations.  I have been listening to the same woman all week.  I think that is the defnition of insanity right there.  Whew.  At least she is now only 10 days behind instead of a month – so there is some progress.

Anyway, the garden is a little quiet now.  It’s time to start putting in the perennials for next year!  I planted those iris rhizomes from last week.  I also periodically check the nurseries to see what is on sale and I did find a few.  I am really, really trying to just buy for the shade garden, but when I saw these beautiful lilies, I couldn’t resist.

 

I love the turks cap lilies!

 

The David Austin rose is full of blooms now:

 

The bush itself doesn’t seem that much taller, but it has spread some since I put it in. I hope it grows upward like it is supposed to. I really don’t like to move roses as the roots go so deep.  

There is also another flush of blooms on the Belinda’s dream in the back:

 

This really could use more sun, but I won’t move it unless it doesn’t bloom next year.  Hopefully the squirrels will leave this bush alone now.

Butterfly bush:

 

There was a hummingbird and a sphinx moth on this plant earlier in the week.  The hummer was all over the garden, so in time I think I will have a lot more as the garden becomes more mature.

To help, I got a new plant.  This is a cardinal flower:

 

Do you like my crabgrass and plantain lawn?  One nice thing is that it stays green in August, unlike the grass.  Also, it grows by spreading and not upwards, so we don’t have to mow much.  Yay for weed lawns! LOL

The BES:

 

You can see how the eating damage stopped after I removed some bugs. All the new flowers are untouched.

The hostas are just about done blooming, but they were pretty.

 

I took this shot from the dining room early this morning. You can see how the hydrangea has grown funny and needs that pruning.

 

It is a paniculata type, so it can be pruned in the fall or spring.  I will prune it this fall.  If you have a hydrangea and don’t know what kind it is, this site is very helpful to identify it and when to prune it.  I am going to take a cutting from this one and see if I can propagate it in case the pruning goes wrong 😀

I am on the look out for some shade plants, so keeping an eye on the nurseries. I want Heucheras and solomon seal for sure, and possibly black snakeroot – hoping for good prices 😀

 

Love my flower chair!

It’s going to be a warm weekend.  We have a hike planned for Sunday morning with my sister and niece.  We are going early to avoid the heat, but hopefully the views will be worth it!

The August garden. Some flowers are sleeping, some are done and some are just coming out.

The cleome are starting to fade now. And check out that coneflower!  <3

I found a suprise popup sunflower. Not sure where this came from – probably a bird dropping seed.

Now that summer flowers are starting to fade, guess what is showing up at the greenhouse? Mums!

I love the mums, but it is a little bittersweet because it means summer is going to come to a close.

I am still loving the agastache!

 

Stone digging is progressing and we have quite a large pile now – and nowhere near finished!

It’s fun to think of the possibilities with these. I will probably end up with a pile twice this size. Maybe I can just build my own castle!   That would be sweet.

Here is my hydrangea:

You can kind of see here the upper part on its own branch and the lower part. After blooming, we will cut off the upper part since it is pushing on the fence.

John cut down the rest of the last stump in the big garden bed (we couldn’t dig it all up since it was too deep and thick). That meant I could lay the rest of the slate path through the bed:

I have been planning out what I want to put in this section. So many choices! It’s partial shade because of the fence to the left of the path and more sunny to the right.

Globe thistles are just starting. I have 3 purchased ones that aren’t quite blooming and this is a transplant from my old garden:

My coneflowers are doing much better after picking off some of those bugs.

My chair in the back:

I have to quit with this chair obsession I have.

I have 3 new flowers arriving this week – just got notice today. All my bulb ordering I did early in the spring will be arriving in stages. The iris rhizomes come now for planting. I am getting these 3 from American Meadows and hopefully they will look like this next year:

Batik:

Night Ruler:

This is the darkest of purples that looks almost black.

And Brindled Beauty:

I can’t believe I never used to grow irises because I  wanted long-blooming flowers all the time. I never knew what I was missing before I got those few a couple years ago.  It’s so exciting!  I might put one out front – or maybe 2 of them. Gotta prepare the spots for them this weekend.

We will be doing some good riding this weekend, probably to the lake for a change. The weather is supposed to be gorgeous!

What’s blooming today? Rocks!!  Any of you keeping track might remember the little wall we removed from the garden bed by the house a couple weeks ago. The bed was very sloping and I was moving dirt when I unearthed a ton of rocks:

I emailed Debby with a picture of my find right away since she has a current obsession with stones LOL! We knew the ones closer to the house were there, but not these into the bed. There is a mix of the big rocks, bricks, slate pieces (from the roof) and interesting mineral specimens.  I then went into the garden bed in the back and started digging by the fence. There are rocks all along the perimeter of the fence, although I wasn’t sure how many were in the garden bed. Turns out a lot!  These were somewhat deep  – and need to go if I am going to plant here.  This is pile 1.

This is from about a 10 foot section along the fence. I can’t imagine how many rocks there are. Enough to have some sort of rock garden or even making a stone path on the side of the house.  I will keep digging around back there and see what comes up.

Pile 2:

Some of them are large and heavy as well. Here is my foot for comparison.  

Functional fitness doing all this, I tell you. No need to lift weights when this stuff is on the schedule!

Then I used a wheeled cart to bring them from the bed to the patio so I can make a giant pile and ponder what to do with them 😀  Maybe I should make a big inukshuk or something.

Anyway, I think I found some of what has been eating my plants.

I have been checking in the morning and evening and got a Japanese beetle, an inch worm and some other bug that I found actually munching the coneflower petals, so I think that was the culprit. I squished it before thinking that I might want to identify what it was.  Duh. Now the flowers seem to be left alone and new growth isn’t showing damage, but I will keep an eye out.

Fairy impatiens:

 

My hydrangea didn’t die and is going to bloom. I have never been able to keep a hydrangea that I planted alive, so this one is good. Although, it was already here when we moved in, so that probably helped 😀

It needs a serious prune as the top half is flopping over the fence, so this fall we will take that part off.

This is the butterfly bush draped over the sweet potato vine pot.

 

The hostas out back are now blooming:

I may keep these after all, but just move them somewhere else.

My agastache out front are really taking off:

I really, really love these flowers. The bees love them, too.  They also love the cleome. Lots of bees in this front garden.

The cantaloupe supreme coneflower sent out a platoon of blooms. This picture really shows the evolution of how the blooms form over time.

As you can see, I also got another fun chair done. I have bought 4 chairs recently to the tune of $16. Three of them were $2 and one was $10.  Two of them were meant for the garden, and you saw the one I did for the back.  This one I got a couple weeks ago from Second Chance Barn. I used one of my sample pots of paint for it (this was a possible bedroom color at the time) and some polyurethane.  Then I stopped at the garden center and got a container refill.  I like those because they are less expensive since you aren’t buying the container, just the plants in a plastic pot. You just pop it into your own container and there you go!

Originally this was going to go in the shade garden, but I needed to move my tippy pots since this spot is too sunny for them. I didn’t really want to have to water those twice a day, so I moved them and put this in the spot.

 

And – my David Austin rose is blooming again.  Yay!

It also got munched on as well.  Jeez Louise. This will have a nice mid summer flush of blooms. In fact, two of my other roses have new growth and buds as well.

Have a great weekend!

 

This is the view from our dining room out the back:

The way the house is built, this room is actually on the ground floor from the front of the house, but it has a walkout basement, which was dug out making the back of the room look out a story up. The flower colors don’t really show up in this picture, but you can see them in the back bed from this window. Some day there will be a ton of blooms out there and maybe a garden bed smack in the middle of the lawn, too 😀

I am going a little crazy on the birdfeeders, I think. I have 2 squirrel proof feeders, which actually work pretty well. The squirrels now sit underneath and wait for birds to throw out seed.

Somebody has been nibbling at my coneflowers, too.  All of the petals are getting eaten off and leaving the middle. 

 

It’s either japanese beetles or inch worms from what I have read.  I haven’t seen anything on them. I hope they stop soon. I won’t spray, so I am going to have to bring out some soapy water or something.

Here is the white swan, which seems okay so far:

 

I bought a new plant. This is Baptisia, AKA false indigo.

 

This is another tall plant, 3-4 feet fully grown. I hope this will bloom later on.

The butterfly bush is still a little scrawny, but tall!  I have more blooms.

 

I even saw a hummingbird on it! It’s sparse feeding for butterflies and hummers in the garden now, but in the future I hope I will get a lot more.

I have a new black-eyed Susan called Maya:

 

The cool thing about this is that the brown middle will fill out into a yellow puff.  You can see it starting to happen on this flower:

And whatever the muncher is, it seems to be on these as well.  🙄 

This is my potted lemongrass.

 

I got this in the hopes of keeping mosquitoes away, but I don’t think it works very well. It smells great, though!  I love lemongrass.

On to the front.  This is the sunsparkler sedum. It is a ground cover sedum and is spreading.

 

I like the color of the leaves. I probably never would have bought one of these on my own, but it came as a bonus plant in an order and I do like it.

My other new specialty coneflower I planted in June is blooming now. This is the Cantaloupe Supreme and I just love it!

 

I got this one at a local nursery, but I will often buy my specialty coneflowers from Bluestone because they have so many different ones that I can’t find here. (Marmalade is on my wish list).

Here is a balloon flower bud just starting to burst open. This will be open all the way tomorrow.

 

Tall snaps:

 

I need to get cages because some of them are flopping over. Annuals always amaze me at how fast they grow in a season.  Not like perennials at all in that regard. 

Like the Cleome – these came in a tiny little 6-pack in May and now are about 3.5 feet tall.

 

Saturday will be a long ride day. It is supposed to be pretty nice, at least during the day.  I have a hankering for a cupcake, so I hope that is true 😀

Have a great weekend!

I has me some flowers! Last weekend one of the local garden centers had a tent clearance sale and I had to check it out, of course!  They had some great deals on plants and boy were people just piling plants into their pile as fast as they were bringing them out.  The sale was in the parking lot and people were just dragging pots over to their car and getting a receipt to take inside.  I did keep myself in check. People were grabbing willy nilly, but I wanted to make sure that I got plants I wanted and not just plants on sale LOL!  My load:

I got 6 plants for $38 including tax. Good deal. Those 5 feet tall delphiniums were only $5 each, marked down from $17! They each came with a cage, too, which is good since I would have had to buy them because they are so tall. Nothing like building a garden from gift cards, free and sale plants 😀

Here is the delphinium up close:

 

It is the faintest pink blush. Don’t they look like they would smell heavenly? They really have hardly smell at all, though.

I also got another agastache.  This is Tangerine Dream:

It’s in the front next to the Raspberry Daquiri.

I also got some balloon flowers (Platycodon). I have been wanting to get some, and interesting that they had dwarf ones on sale. I didn’t know they came in a dwarf variety and that meant I could get some to put in the front bed closer to the edge.

I love how the buds look like hot air balloons.

Then they pop open.

I also got a Astra pink:

In the back, we finally moved that old fencing and the posts to the curb hoping someone would take them away and by the end of the day, everything was gone – including the posts with cement on the bottom!

That meant I had to get to work clearing out the bed.  There was a broken window buried in there, so I will forever have to be careful in this bed. Here is the progress so far.

 

Hopefully this weekend we will tackle removing that little wall to the right there. It is slanted and really serves no purpose because you can’t sit on it.  I want to be able to walk directly into this bed from the patio and this is where we are going to put a water feature. I was the one that stuck those lilies in there 😀  I did find another flower under the window, though.

This is a gooseneck loosestrife. I have been letting things come up when I see them, and about 95% of the time I have been cultivating weeds, but this turned out to be a real flower 😀  These can be invasive, so I might pot them up and bury the pot so they don’t take over.  If anyone wants some, let me know!

My alliums are just about open:

 

I think these will multiply?

Finally, some blooms have appeared on Debby’s fairy impatiens!

.

I have 3 of these underneath what I think is a viburnum, so they get dappled sunlight.

I will have open blooms soon of my new coneflower – this is the cantaloupe supreme and I love the color that is peeking out.

 

Landscaping is really hard work and a bit overwhelming, especially when you start from scratch, but the rewards are so worth it!

 

The planning is pretty fun, too.  I feel like a kid in a candy store at garden centers.  Good thing I have to stick to some sort of budget or I would be in a lot of trouble 😀

 

Hey – I’m back!  It’s been busy around here in the evenings and I just haven’t had time to compile a post.  I haven’t been in the garden as much as I would like, either. 

I am making plans for these bare areas. 😀

I tried a different sweet potato vine this year. I really  like the color, but it doesn’t seem to want to trail so much like others I have tried:

I have a new friend in the garden, too!  

 

 

I uncovered this toad when I was moving mulch. I had to move him since I need to move the pile. Not sure if he stuck around or not, but I hope so.

I am so in love with the cleome.

 

It’s an interesting flower. It always has the bloom at the top. It sort of grows out and up from the middle of the bloom, so it keeps getting taller with a fresh flower all the time at the top. Kind of like a fountain in really slow motion.

White snaps are now blooming:

 

This is my sun sparkler sedum that I got as a free plant with an order from Great Garden Plants. It’s growing bigger.

This is starting to get buds on it, too. I don’t know anything about this plant, actually. I do like the free, though!

On to the back.

This is my trunk plant:

🙂  I wheeled it out on a cart to sit in the sun. I sprayed the inside with vinegar to get rid of the musty smell. Now it smells like vinegar! It’s a cool trunk, I have to say. I might paint the inside instead of doing fabric. The wood on the bottom is stained, so I don’t want to just leave it.

Anyway, back to the flowers.  My razzmatazz coneflower is opening up.  It took a beating over the winter, so it looks a little ragged.

 

More daylilies – and a rose that needs deadheading:

 

We have had a lot of rain lately and I love how the lupine leaves collect it in the center of the leaves like a little diamond:

 

The milkshake coneflower is opening. It starts out looking like White Swan and then the ruffle will open over time.

 

The butterfly bush opened up a huge bloom:

 

It’s so fragrant, too. It smells like honey.  I have already seen a frittilary come visit it.

 

One last shot of a garden ornament that I stuck in with the hostas back in the spring:

 

It’s almost lost in a sea of leaves!

Hopefully this weekend I will spend some weeding quality time in the garden beds. One of the local nurseries is having a big clearance sale tomorrow and I might be salivating just a little bit 😀

Happy Independence Weekend! I only had to work a part day today, so that was nice. You just never know how much work will come in on a holiday.

With all that rain and now sun the last couple days and the garden explodes 😀

I am loving this mushroom a lot. It makes me want to make some for the back gardens, too, although there are no utility pipes back there 🙂 .

The cosmos keeps blooming. The nice thing about annuals is that they flower all summer long if you keep them deadheaded.

More snapdragons. I have always loved snapdragons.

 

I have a few perennials out front as well. The Agastache has more flowers on it.

 

I still haven’t seen any hummingbirds at it yet.  I have seen them, just not on my flowers or feeders.

This is liatris.  One of the plants I snagged from the old house in the spring.

More flowers on my little foxglove:

I love the freckled throats on them.  I have 3 foxglove plants and they are in the back of the garden bed and very small right now. So, no one can see them unless they go into the garden bed.  Or I guess all of you can see them since I put a photo up 😀

The front bed looks good for a first year:

There are 2 shrubs that are very tiny, one on each side (less than a foot tall now). One is a calycanthus and the other is a hydrangea. Then the rose bush in the middle. Those are the permanent items. The nice thing about perennials is most of them can be moved around as gardens change without much trouble.

In the back, the Enchanted evening has flowers and more buds:

My Belinda rose got attacked by squirrels. Last Saturday, I was out in the morning in the garden and everything was fine. I went back out in the afternoon and a squirrel had bitten off every single bud on that rose bush – and bent some canes.  How irritating. I may have to move the bush because it is in the pathway the squirrels always take by the trees.

The alium are getting closer to blooming!

Way in the back by my sign is the milkshake coneflower, which is also getting ready to bloom. Yay!

My butterfly bush has gotten really tall. It has one huge branch and a bunch of small ones. I had to stake it up. See how tall it is?

That’s 5 feet.  Those are buds getting ready to open as well.

Here is hoping the weather isn’t terrible tomorrow.  We have 2 parties to go to, but rain or shine – it will be a great day!

 

 

My favorite post of the week!  I love to peek out in the garden every day and see what is new. That’s the great thing about gardening. There is always something new and many times something unexpected!

On the annual front, the cosmos are filling out nicely.

 

This week the cleome also started sending out side blooms and are getting fuller:

I just love that color of snapdragon. Whenever you get a mix, you never know what color will come out.  Here is another nice color from the mix:

Whenever you buy perennials, unless you are buying the big mature pots, many times you often have to wait a year for blooms. It normally takes a year for them to get their feet. Then a small show of blooms the next year and then the third year is when they really take off.  I am always happy to see blooms on a new perennial.

This is Agastache, also called hyssop or hummingbird mint.  This is one I will get more of in hopes of attracting hummingbirds to the yard. It sends out little tubular flowers that the hummingbirds and hummingbird moths love. This one is called Rasberry daquiri:

 

Hopefully there will be some interest in this plant.

Around to the back – there is still a lot of work to do. I have this whole section that has become a dumping ground:

That fence was what had been pulled up from the side of the house and left in a pile. I need to put it on Craigs list for free and get it out of here since we aren’t going to put it back up. I started a compost pile here for now and I also stuck some daylilies here just for fun – and they are blooming. We aren’t totally sure what will be happening here. It is on the left of the patio.

My roses are blooming now.  This is Enchanted Evening and I love the color:

Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger; you may see a stranger across a crowded room..

Yes, I do sing that a lot. 😀

The free rose I got from Jackson and Perkins is also blooming and getting big. I was worried it ended up in too much shade, but it is throwing out blooms.

I also have some daylilies here. Just a clump. I removed most of them from this bed because I want to save it for my full sun plants. I actually thought I had only a clump of daffodils, but the lilies were mixed in there.

I will move this clump in the fall.

I received some drumstick aliums last year from a fellow gardener and they will be blooming soon!

I also wonder if anyone can help me identify these?  They are growing in the shade garden. It’s not Virginia creeper because it isn’t a vine. Each of these comes up as a separate plant.

 

I have seen them on the bike path as well, so they are some sort of woodland thing. They don’t flower as far as I know.

Looks like biking might be a bust this weekend, but we are going to try to get out early in the morning tomorrow and get to the lake if the forecast holds off until the afternoon.

I have blooms this week. Yay!  But first, work on our shed.  We really need a shed for all the outdoor stuff. Our garage is too small for anything more than the car and our bikes (and it is a tight squeeze for that). So, we need storage space outside for garden and maintenance stuff. Right now the lawnmower sits on the covered stoop outside the back door!  We decided after we sold the house that we would buy a shed. We got a 7 x 7 foot shed at Lowe’s and had it delivered. Now we need to assemble it. Eeek!

It’s going to go over on the right side by the fence.

Here is the disaster area in the back:

We also have a lot of brush from cutting everything down.  We put a lot out at the curb during the city pickup, but there wasn’t enough room for all of it, so we will be using it in our firepit as it  dries out.

I started moving the extra mulch to the back. I wasn’t going to mulch this bed while I am still working on it, but the weeds are driving me insane! I can’t keep up with it.  It looks better, actually.

My 100-pound rose bush made it through the move and a really tough winter:

This makes me really happy.

The lupine have established themselves and are growing. I don’t think they will bloom this year, though. I love the look of the leaves.

My annuals in front are really starting to grow now:

The cleome are getting taller. This will get bushier with more time.

I like these flowers. I never really had the room to grow them. Now I have all the room 😀

More snapdragons.

It’s funny that these can flop over in heavy rain and then they just start growing up from the ground. I staked this one back up after it was on the ground for a couple days and you can see the funny curve in it 😀

Now for my new purchase. With one of my gift cards, I got a David Austin English rose.  They are shrub roses that are blends of old fashioned roses and newer varieties. I pretty much only grow shrub roses or floribundas. I don’t want to mess with hybrid teas because they often require spraying and such and are too fussy for me.  Anyway, this is Fair Bianca:

I wish you could smell it, too. So fragrant!

I am over the moon about this. I now have 4 rose bushes and 2 climbing roses. Eeeeee!

Slowly, but surely.  Lori’s garden grows 😉

Other new plants added recently:  Beebalm, Russian Sage, bleeding heart and I sprinkled marigold and teddy bear sunflower seeds, which have sprouted finally.

Saturday is for riding. I think it will be the only good day of the weekend. Happy Father’s Day!

Continuing work in the beds.  I have cleared out a lot of the shade bed. I wasn’t thinking I would get to much of that this year, but we have been making such great progress this spring.  I had some astilbe roots to plant, so early in the spring I cleared a section and then finished the rest later. Here is what it looked like last year:

What a mess!  There really wasn’t much salvagable in there. Lots of weeds and a couple grape vines, which were old and not great.  The bush there on the left had been cut in half and was bare on one side, so that came out.  I did keep a few daylilies and some Virginia creeper.

I also found a tick on me after working in this area. Not really a surprise there, but it is good to get this cleaned out.

Here is it cleared out. Still some stuff popping up after I got the beds cleared, but without mulch that is going to happen.

 

I was pondering what to do here and John suggested a water feature!  I hadn’t even thought of that. It is close to the house, so running electric wouldn’t be too hard. That would be pretty cool.

Those hostas in the background. Now that they have filled out, I remember why I didn’t like them so much.  They are huge and need dividing.

I thought I would show one of my favorite tools for gardening. It’s one that I use every time I go out for all kinds of stuff.  You know how inside I love the taping knife because of its versatility. Same thing with this tool.  It’s called a Cape Cod  weeder.

I use it for more than weeding, but it does a great job at that. You can use the pointed end to uproot taproot weeds, or lay it on its side like this to scrape surface weeds:

See? Makes quick work of it.

It’s easy to get around and under plants with this.

My snapdragons are just starting to bloom in the front. I got the rocket ones, which are going to get several feet tall.

 

Geraniums blooming.

These are at the very front of our sidewalk. My hope is to put a peony on each side in this spot. Maybe this fall.

 

This weekend is the big craft festival in town. I can walk there this year, which is pretty neat. No worries about parking!  I am going to look for garden stuff and a walking stick if that particular vendor is there this year. Have a great weekend!