We had a couple of really warm days this week and the garden just popped right up!  Some plants I thought were lost poked out of the ground and I was thrilled to see that.

More tulips came up the week – the late ones.  These are King’s Blood:

Purple passion:

Maureen and Queen of the Night:

One lone Shirley tulip:

Sadly, a squirrel or something nipped this one right off the day after I took this picture.

Christmas Marvel:

I don’t edit these for color at all. The colors just glow in cloudy weather and really is my favorite weather to take pictures in, either that or early morning.

My bleeding hearts are getting ready to bloom! Likely next week.  Love these plants 😀

If anyone wants tall old-fashioned daylilies, let me know – I have a ton here.

The is the amethyst-in-snow centaura:

These are my containers this year. I went all foliage with a sweet potato vine, sun tolerant coleus and persian shield – which I was so happy to find at the garden center.

 

This will look cool when it fills out (hopefully).  You can see the dirt that a squirrel dug out of the container.  This is why I can’t have nice things…

A really for real What’s Blooming post!  I can’t tell you how happy I am to see the blooms and the green lawns and the tiny, tiny buds on the trees.  The temps have just gotten to a level where now things are really starting to take off.

Tulips on parade!

I have hyacinths, which look strange this year. This patch of the garden had ice on it for longer than the rest and maybe that stunted them.

I was trying to figure out what looked so funny about the picture to me and I realized the Jim Shore kitty is turned around. That must have happened sometime over the winter underneath the snow.

Pink impression:

Golden parade:

Apricot Dreams. These are the longest lasting of my tulips. These are at least 5 years old.

 

They have an unsual purple tint underneath the apricot which only shows up on cloudy days:

You can see the butterfly bush in the background there. I thought for sure it was dead. It wakes late, but usually I see signs of life by this time of year. Yesterday I saw the tiniest of buds at the bottom, so maybe all is not lost. It doesn’t look great, but I really don’t want to have to replace that big bush. It’s too big a part of the garden to leave a hole, so I will just hope it grows strong enough.

My shade garden is finally starting to grow. I even cleaned it up!

All 9 Astilbes made it – yay!  I think I only lost a couple plants from this horrid winter, so I count myself lucky.

And on orchid watch:

Squeee!!  This thing is taking forever LOL!  I am so excited to see what color it is.

Fall is blooming!  John put up the fall flag:

It’s funny, I have 5 flags.  One for each season and one Mardi Gras flag.  No other holidays 😀  I love Mardi Gras!

Here are some wild asters (I think that is what they are) that popped up in the hedges:

Next to our beautiful driveway!

I had to get that in there.  We have had this driveway for a little over a year now and I still love it just as much.  More so now that it is sealed!

My sweet potato vines are turning color.

That pumpkin will be made into pie at some point.

My mums that I finally stuck in the ground.

Nothing says fall like mums, right?

The burning bush is turning – or burning, I guess I should say.

Still have some blooms on the butterfly bush:

The afternoons have been warm enough that there have been monarchs on the bush this week.

Blooms on the knockout rose.

The sedum at the bottom of the above picture:

It’s actually getting past peak a little early.

And one last shot on today’s bike ride:

Fall color goes so fast. It’s so beautiful when it arrives and if you blink, you miss it.

 

There is a gorgeous weekend coming up and perfect riding weather.  Time for a cupcake ride! 😀

Man, what a week.  I got in after midnight Monday night.  So, I guess that was actually Tuesday morning?  Anyway, jet lag kicked my ass.  Not to mention that I was running John’s business *and* trying to work my job.  Obviously, I had to cut my hours at my job this week to do this.  Then, just as I was feeling better – I stayed up way too late to watch the Broncos on Thursday night.  At least they won.   I can’t wait for John to get back Saturday night!!

The garden is winding down.  I need to get some mums.  I used to have some in the garden, but they did not come back this year.

Lots of cheerful black-eyed Susans still.

In several places:

 

My lone tiki torch:

The knockout rose keeps plugging along.  This is such a prolific bloomer all season.

These plants are flowering tobacco.  For the last couple years, I struggled to grow these from seed and ended up with 1 single bloom last year.  All that trouble and it looks like it reseeded itself and these sprung up seemingly overnight.  I think these are too late growing to bloom this year, but I will leave them just in case.  Normally I pull anything up that is right by the path, but what the heck?

The wishbone flowers.  These are very sweet and just terrific bloomers all season, happy annuals that they are.

Lirope is blooming now.  This is such a tough little plant.  These are old, too. I have had them probably 4 or 5 years now?

And the other fall favorite – the Autumn Joy Sedum.

This is still pretty light in color, but it’s early yet.

No sighting of the momma and kittens since before I left for Vegas. That doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t there; I just haven’t seen them, but hopefully someone scooped them up.

We have a nice Saturday on tap in the mid 70s and I am going to go for an ice cream ride since the shops will all be closing soon for the season. Fall is in the air!

 

Another Friday rolls around. My life feels like work, work, work, bike, bagels, work, work, bike, cupcake, work, work. 😀 Time goes by so fast!

Actually, we did attend a free concert last night during the Lake George Music Festival.

 

Shostakovitch cello concerto, which was pretty amazing, and Beethoven 5.  This was a great group of musicians, too.  It was supposed to be an outdoor concert, but rained pushed it inside.  Of course, the free concert ended up costing $15 because we got a parking ticket because our meter was broken.  Gotta love. 🙄

Anyhoo, another new butterfly this week!  This is a black swallowtail.  Swallowtails are always so hard to get pictures of.  Other types of butterflies sit still – swallowtails flutter.  all.the.time.

 

The best shots I could get were from the underside!

 

There was also Mr. Grasshopper on the butterfly bush.  Not sure quite what he was doing there.

Funky focus on that shot.  Wonder how I did that??

I moved one of my bird feeders because the birdies were making a mess on the porch.  Now they make a mess on the ground and sunflowers are growing!  Casual gardener that I am, I just let them pop up wherever.

A nice bit of cheeriness to pass by on the path:

I also was so excited to see my newest coneflower sending up a bloom!  I bought a Tiki Torch. It’s a baby and I really was expecting it to need another year to bloom, but it sent up one stalk.

SQUEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!  I love the color 😀

Yellow snapdragons:

My back stoop geraniums:

And the dahlias:

We have another gorgeous weekend coming up. Yay!  It just can’t get more perfect.  I am thinking a cupcake will be in there somewhere.

I still can’t believe how green the garden is.  Or the lawn. Usually it looks a bit brown in August.

The lawn is about 80% crabgrass, but at least it is green.

Nothing new in the garden, but still blooms.

 

Midseason flush for the scentimental:

I had forgotten to put away my watering can. I get distracted sometimes and set it down and then forget it for days, especially when it rains.  It looks kind of neat here, though.

It may be August, but our nights have been cool.  We hit 48 the other night! 😯  I spied this on my burning bush.

It can’t be turning already, can it??

I actually also noticed the tiniest hint of color on the sedum, too.

I fully have the houseplant bee-in-the-bonnet now.  (I can just hear John when he reads this).  I got that orchid the other day, then I decided on Friday to take a break from work and visit the greenhouse.  I went to Garden Time to check out their houseplants and some were on sale!

I don’t know what these are, and the person working was not a houseplant specialist, so I will have to do some research.

 

Then I got 2 begonias because I loved how they looked!  These will not flower. They are all just for the foliage (foilage – hahaha!)

And this uber cool one:

Pixie staking claim already:

I need some containers to put these in and I decided to venture into the attic above our shop that is attached to the back of the house and see what might be up there.  It’s got a cool trap door complete with a winch to open it.

Secret hideaway!

It’s pretty scary up there, though.  And dirty. I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but the shop used to be the home of the Fort Edward Gun Club in the 1950s.  When we first moved in, we found a lot of remnants from that time, including bullets!  There are tons of old paper targets in the attic and various things not related to the gun club.  Over the years we have picked our way through it and cleaned a lot out, but there is still stuff up there.  I reminded myself that I got my tetanus shot updated last fall and headed up.

I didn’t find much for using as a planter, but I did find a couple interesting things.  Newspaper from 1948:

And this box:

It’s empty (thank goodness).  There are some things I want to just keep for when we sell the house as sort of a historical marker and I think this box will be one of them.  It has a label on it where it was shipped from.

Anyhoo, I thought you might find that neat. Guess I will be looking elsewhere for planters, though!

There is an awesome weather weekend coming up. I will be solo biking!

Yay – my favorite post of the week is here!  I should just give it up and do a garden blog. 😀

Late July and August always seem to be good times in my garden. I know a lot gardens can look a bit tired at this time of year, but I have a lot of late bloomers and it keeps the color going.  Not to mention all the rain we have had this year.  I have only had to actually hand water the garden a couple times this summer!

This is the very last gasp of the old-fashioned daylilies.  Tomorrow this bloom will be gone.  I’ll have to be cutting down the stems now.

 

One surprising plant to me is the campanula.  I had moved these over last year and have been rewarded with more blooms this year.  I thought they were finished, but now there are new blooms on this plant.

 

I had no idea those would repeat bloom!

I have a couple gaillardias left in the garden.  My BIL gave me some a few years ago and I have slowly lost them all, except for a couple.

 

I cut the seed heads off and leave them in the hopes that I will get new ones, but I guess they just aren’t in the right spot.

Butterfly bush.  Now that there are lots of blooms, the butterflies have arrived!

 

Butterfly bush.  Now that there are lots of blooms, the butterflies have arrived!

Last week was the sphinx moth.  This week is the giant swallowtail:

 

He is really big:

And a new one this year!  This is a White Admiral:

You can tell this is an old butterfly because of the ragged wing.  At least he is getting in a good meal in the last part of his life!  White Admirals are only seen in Canada and the northeast and a bit off the upper midwest.  Cool!

It is really hard to get pictures of these butterflies, too, because they flutter around so much.  This is the book I have handy at this time of year:

 

I have been known to run outside with this book in hand to figure out which butterfly it is 😀

More baby snaps.  I have a lot of seedlings this year.

 

More blooms on my new rose bush.

 

I’m always a sucker for the flower with raindrops on it.  😀

One last bloom – my sweet potato vine.  I have these in pots on the porch more for the foliage, but the blooms are really pretty when they have them.

 

It’s John’s birthday weekend, so we are going to party it up!  It’s his choice all weekend 😀  I have a cake to bake, too.

It’s what’s blooming time!  I am enjoying my garden a lot this year.  It’s nice just to stand out and admire it   I have to wonder what people think seeing me out there with my camera all the time.   I was out the other night taking some shots and a woman stopped and told me that she loves to walk by my garden every day and look at it.  How sweet is that?  I do this garden for me, but I am glad that other people enjoy it as well.

 

The walkway is making progress.  Or rather, John is making progress on the walkway.  Once it is done we will fill in with sand.

 

It’s a mold that you pour the concrete into.  One bag of cement per mold (it takes 2 molds to go across this sidewalk).  I am not totally crazy about it, but it is much better than the broken concrete that was there.  Now that weather is cooperating, it should go faster.

My 100-pound rose bush has more blooms on it.  The mid summer flush is always small, but welcome!

 

My Liatris:

 

I have a few blooms on the perennial bachelor buttons, too!

 

The other kind hasn’t done anything yet. Not sure why this one is blooming and the other color one is not, but then I wasn’t expecting anything this year from them.

The new rose bush is growing pretty fast!

 

I love the color.

 

I am still very taken with these lilies!

 

They are pretty tall, too, about 3 feet or so.

My butterfly bush is now starting to bloom:

 

It’s a big boy at 5 feet tall!  Now that it is flowering, my friend the sphinx moth is back.

 

Of course, it probably isn’t the same one from last year, but we can pretend.

 

I also have another coneflower. This is Green Jewel:

 

And how is this for a lovely looking plant?

 

This is Pixie’s catnip.  It was outside and one of the neighborhood cats knocked it off the porch, ate most of it and rolled on it enough to flatten the stems! I thought it was a goner.  I repotted it and am now getting new growth.  I haven’t been able to harvest any for Pixie because of that.  Not quite sure what to do with this.  Can’t have it inside because Pixie will go insane over it.  Can’t have it outside because the neighborhood cats get it.

I have a dozen more pictures, but guess I had better stop there 😀

 

Here’s to a fabulous weekend!