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.
