Green and blooming

Unlike the past 2 or 3 tears, we have had rain this summer.  yay!  My garden is looking happy for the first time in a long while so I thought I’d share. 

The tipsy pots!  Love these.

Daisies and blanket flowers flanking a barrel full of celosia and purple sweet potato vine.  The yellow coreopsis behind the daisies started blooming after I took the picture.

Daylilies.  Their bloom time is almost over now, but they have been splashing their color around for the last month or so.

Purple fountain grass, coreopsis, coneflower.  Sweet potato vine, lilies and daisies.  Black-eyed Susan (very late to bloom this year, just starting).

Phlox. Sunflower.

Asiatic lilies.  One of these years we’ll manage to keep the rabbits from stripping all the leaves off the stems so these beauties might have a chance to multiply and come up in gorgeous bunches instead of single blooms.

The swing set birdfeeder.  My son built the storage bench in the background with guidance from my dad last month.  The sunflowers are volunteers planted by the birds.  We pulled a lot of sprouts but left a few to fill in blank spots and bloom and make the birds happy.  They like to pluck the seeds out of the flower centers.

Coreopsis, daisies and feather reed grass. The daisy clumps are all blooming heavily now, even prettier, which I suppose begs the question why I didn’t go out and take another picture…but it’s dark now, so these pictures will have to do for now.

The castle, now a glorified planter.  By the end of summer the German ivy in the tower will be spilling halfway down the tower.

Behind this volunteer sunflower is half the veggie garden. Honestly, the volunteer sunflowers look better and sturdier than the ones we planted on purpose.  Next year I think we’ll skip the seed packets and take our chances with the birdseed!

You can see we have a bit of a gnome problem.  There must be at least half a dozen out there plotting to infiltrate the house.

In past years the impatiens I planted around these hostas completely covered the ground with mounds of color.  I think the past years’ flowers have used up the nutrients in the soil and I didn’t add enough compost this spring to replenish it.  Note for next spring…

Herbs and marigolds in early June, then late June.  And another gnome.

Lilies and switch grass below the deck. Sweet potato vine, red salvia, annual vinca and marigolds in the boxes.  The sweet potato is finally spilling over like I wanted it to, unlike the sorry (or perhaps just thirsty) specimens from the last couple of years.

That’s about it.  There’s also a lovely little shaded corner with a small patio and Adirondack chairs, but the rabbits, and possibly some deer, have wreaked havoc there this year so it looks a little sorry.  I haven’t been inspired to pull out the camera to document the nibbling (well, more like feasting than nibbling).

How is your garden growing this summer?

Wrapping up summer

From a weather perspective there is still plenty of summer left to come, but the kids are heading back to school on Thursday so we’re exchanging summer’s non-routine for regular routine. 
It has been a lovely, mostly lazy summer for us.  The last two weeks in July we headed back to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to visit family.  It was lovely to spend time with my parents, then with my in-laws.  The kids got a good grandparent fix, and I hope the grandparents enjoyed the grandkid fix as well.
The weather was lovely the whole time.  It has been so beastly hot and humid here at home all summer that the temperatures in the mid 20’s Celsius were a treat for us.  The scenery in Pubnico wasn’t hard to take either:

And Smuggler’s Cove:

I didn’t take many pictures in New Brunswick but my son took this lovely one of the sawmill at King’s Landing Historic Village.

We wilted in the heat and humidity as soon as we stepped off the plane here, but happily my garden hadn’t.  The girl we hired to water the flower beds did a great job, because we hear that it was hot and dry the whole two weeks we were away but my garden looked very happy.  A little weedy too, but we hadn’t asked her to weed, just keep things alive! I spent several days tidying things up – and not doing as good a watering job!
Remember these flowerbeds?

June 29th on the left, August 3rd on the right!  That sunflower is a happy accident, sprouted from a seed from the bird feeder.  The vine on the far end has grown even more in the two weeks since and now covers most of that end of the frame.  Now that we’ve beaten back the Japanese beetles (with nasty chemicals, sorry!) it might actually become covered in pretty yellow flowers again.

Mid-June on the left, August 2nd on the right!  You have to love those sweet potato vines!  They do fill in very nicely  The coreopsis are now in full bright yellow bloom too, which doesn’t show well in this picture, but looks gorgeous beside the purple sweet potato.  Finally we are getting pretty blooms on the hibiscus at the back now that we’ve sprayed the beetles.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, let me introduce you to the Japanese beetle:

Pretty little thing isn’t it? At some angles it even has a pretty green iridescence. It’s less pretty when it is one among a half dozen all clustered on one leaf or flower bud, munching away, with more on all the other flower buds.  These little pretties reduced the leaves on 20 feet of grapevine to mere veins last summer.  This summer they’ve been deprived of the grapevine (it died of old age) but I’ve actually been flicking them off my marigolds.  Yes, marigolds!  Those are the flowers you’re supposed to plant to deter pests because nothing likes them!
Ah well, life goes on.  Just because I’ve done no quilting at all the last six weeks, I’ll subject you to a few more garden pictures before closing.  There should be quilty progress in a few weeks, I hope!
     

Detour through the garden

Now that I look back, I did accomplish a few things the last few weeks while I was suffering from quilter’s block.  Well, last week was literally a washout due to heavy rain and thunderstorms, but the week before I puttered in the garden quite a bit.
First up was a repurposing of the old swing set.  Here’s what it looked like brand new and in use in the summer of 2004.
You can’t tell from this picture, but the kids were very enthusiastic in their swinging and that frame rocked back and forth precariously so we decided to set the legs in concrete.
Fast forward 7 years.  You can see below that the frame is rather faded, and you can guess that the kids have grown somewhat and no longer fit on this set.  We could dispose of this now, or pass it on, but those legs are set in concrete.  Removing it seems like an awful lot of work.

We lost a small maple tree last year.  A lot of birdfeeders hung on that tree, and we missed the birds once the tree was gone.
How about using the swing set as a bird feeding station?  It looked a little junky, all faded with the feeders hanging off it.
Think a little harder…
Red spray paint (messy stuff if a breeze blows up while you’re spraying!) perked up the frame. The plantings look a little pitiful in the picture, but much better in person. In my mind’s eye I can see the plants filling in.  The little tuft of ornamental grass will grow up past the crossbar, with lovely plumes in the fall, and the plants in the planter birdbath will spill over the sides.  The ornamental sweet potato plants will mound and spread 2 feet or more.  The black eyed susan vine will twine up the strings and up the frame on the far end… I’ll have to post update pictures if and when it grows into what my mind’s eye sees!
Up next was a flowerbed beside the driveway.  This was an unexpected task.  We had a huge, gorgeous viburnum of some sort there.  This spring after the snow melted but before the bush leafed in to hide the trunk we noticed holes at the base of the trunk.  It turns out they were caused by carpenter ants, and we just don’t want those anywhere close to the house if we can help it.  The pest control guy agreed that if they had found that tree to be a good shelter once, they might like it again, so it is gone.  Now what? It left a big empty space. 

I divided a few perennials from elsewhere in the yard and transplanted some here. We also bought a hibiscus shrub that should fit the space comfortably as it grows. I tossed in a couple of annual sweet potato vines to fill in the space until the perennials get bigger next year, though the vines are still tiny and not filling anything in yet!  I hope that improves in a few weeks. Of course as soon as I planted all this we had a bout of unseasonably hot weather,  reaching about 35C (95F)  3 days in a row.  The newly transplanted vegetation was highly stressed!  I think the past week of cooler, wet weather has perked everything up a bit now.  Hopefully this sorry little patch will look less sorry as the summer goes on.
If you’ve read this far about my garden ramblings,  I’ll leave you with a picture of the last two summers’ efforts, finally filling in nicely.


Well, the planter in the top of the castle tower is new. I’m hoping the German ivy will spill down the sides… I’m done now, really! Done rambling on and planting though I have to admit that earlier today I stumbled upon a blog with a really fun “tipsy pots” planter…