Monthly WrapUp

I've been enjoying writing my posts here lately.  Looking at my post count for the year, it stands at a whopping twenty.  This will be 21!

Pretty much as soon as I challenged myself to writing 8 posts a month to easily get to 100 posts for the year, I stopped writing.  Too odd.  I guess I can't fool me into anything.

This month has been about the garden.  There are a few flaws, but I have loved my garden this season.

I have other topics in mind but they haven't made it to the page yet.   I am hoping to write some up regularly so I'm not doing my November post challenge to jam in a year's worth of writing into a month or so.   That's the old me.


I've moved my blog rolls around.  They're all still there, just rearranged as to what's on top.

My Podcast list is still here, it's just waaaaaay down at the bottom.  I added in quite a few new ones, particularly fiction.   I haven't had a chance to listen to them all, I'm sort of bookmarking them for myself.  And for you, of course.

This Week In The Garden

Hardly any time spent in the garden this week, but that's how it goes.   Finally some decent temperatures, 80s with night times in the 60s.  Some things love it, some things hate it.

The Little Mexican Cucumbers

How to use a can of spray paint on a shelf and not cover it all.  Lots of paint went oof, straight out into the air.   This is such a pretty shelf, and the paint really brings out the details, I think.

After spending years in the garage and shed, I nailed this little birdhouse to the fence this season and soon after a little brown bird made it it's home.

Garage sale find!  I went garage saling with my sister in law, who knows her way around to every sale.    I really don't need things, but because I have so many containers, things for the garden that I can set pots on are invaluable.  This little metal table is pretty perfect.

Also found:  A little holder for pictures that I saw and thought it would be a great little trellis.

It will get a rose colored spray paint.  And maybe I'll use it instead to hold laminated pretty seed packets and hang it in the garden shed.

This Week In the Garden

 

Hot hot hot.   A couple of begonias suffered terribly from the heat despite a day of rain and my watering efforts.  They might recover.

It's all about the weeds this week.   R1 (Raised perennial bed one, aka "The kidney shaped bed) took about five hours to weed.   I pulled all the tradescantias, a scraggly phlox, and the very last irises in my garden that originated with my former neighbor The Creature.   I need to go back through and make sure I got all the roots, but it looks really nice.

Next up is R2 (Raised bed two, so clever).    It is huge, and about five hours of work got me all the way around the periphery of it, plus I did some initial pulling of the newer perennial garden which we might as well call The Weed Pit.  

Look! a few inches of open ground!   This garden had tradescantias, an ongoing battle with Queen Anne's Lace, and all those plain green hostas you see in the center are self sown and they're coming out.   This is only a quarter of the garden.  It goes waaay over to the right.


The Weed Pit is still weedy, monstrously so, and it also has what we shall call  Hacky Hostas that will be yanked.  I moved a coneflower into this garden last year and maybe six daylilies.  The coneflower is barely blooming and it was gigantic last season, and long blooming.   Only one of the day lilies here has bloomed, reliable old June Bug.

Other daylilies, still in the veg garden, are blooming happily.  I think I should move the transplants back into the vegetable area.

Seed Babies

Beans, those magical things, are sprouting right up and thus far they haven't been shorn to the ground as they are every single year.  Suspiciously, I did find a tiny strawberry right in amongst them.  Unseen foes at work!  Grow, little beans, grow!

My large garden which got the most varieties of seeds has some teensy lettuce coming up and what I think are flowers, likely zinnias.   I have the maps in my garden notebook, but haven't transferred those maps to my handier garden graph paper yet.  Soon.


Teeny Things

I put a couple of my "Farm Fairy Garden" things in the garden.   It's my "Farm Fairy Garden" because I have a little windmill and a barn and some cows, etc that I planned to have in my vegetable garden last year, but they got sort of overrun by the plants they were near.  Try again next season.

This season more than any other I've moved pots around to new and better locations.  That mobility is supposed to be one of the reasons you do container gardening, but in the past I haven't done it much if at all.

Once the mulch was in I moved my nice big begonias over by the swing seat, and filled the cute, but difficult-to-set-plants-in bicycle.

This morning I washed and scrubbed down with a metal brush one of my favorite metal stands.  You can't even see these stands in pictures half the time, but this one is going to be a pretty sky blue which will look nice by the shed, and you'll be able to see it at last.

Just For Fun

I went through all my saved web sites looking for image generators, comic makers, word search and crossword makers, all the good stuff!

All the ones that are still up and running are, for a time, over on the right.

In case you've got the summer doldrums, these should help.

Have Fun!

In The Garden

Last week's garden was an almost total rain out.

This week has been an amazing heat swamp.  90s and air thick with humidity.

Toughies that we are, we took our delivery of four cubic yards of wood mulch and spread it in the vegetable garden and sideyard in just a couple hours.  It really needed it.  We found it had been three years since we last got mulch.

Now it's all beautiful.

Despite the heat, I raked my beds smooth and planted dozens of seeds.  This might work, because there's always the idea of a second season in the garden.  Planting now gives fall harvests, hopefully.   For some reason I had the best time planting those flower and vegetable seeds, and that happiness can't be taken away by any crummy old weather to come.

In a season where we still had snow in May, accompanied by very cold temps, then very hot, I say anything goes.  It also happens more often than not that it is still hot in September and October.  There's a chance the garden will pick up the time it lost in spring with an extra gardening month in fall.  Could happen.

Here are the garden highlights.

Drenched Barbara Mitchell

Drenched Spiderman

Annual Dahlia

Daylily June Bug

Coreopsis

Astilbe

Nasturtium "Cherelle"

Salvia "Rockin' Deep Purple"

Nasturtium

Fuschia much happier in a new spot on the fence

Spiderman glorying in the sunshine

Verbena "Lascar Pink" happier in a new spot

Little volunteers from last year's annuals.  

Dianthus "Supra Salmon"

I love this little planter with it's spigot and tiny fence with birds on it, but can't quite get a picture that does it justice.

Scraggly side yard all cleared out and ready for mulch.  Dragging the hose through that dirt every day, ugh.

Where all the things from the side yard went.

The vegetable garden before weeding and raking beds smooth.

A new sitting spot in the vegetable garden, and the little mushroom guy gets to be my handy table.

This little corner makes the whole garden look pretty.

Veronica "First Love"

A mulched and much nicer sideyard. 

The vegetable garden as it should be.