I love standing at the window watching a gentle summer rain storm. It’s so relaxing.
I do NOT enjoy standing at the window watching hail the size of marbles pound my flowers and punch holes in my vegetable garden.
Grrrrrr.
Gardening
Bees are buzzin’
It’s late July and this cool, rainy summer has made everything late in my gardens. And even though I don’t have enough energy these days to make it look perfect, there’s a lot of lovely stuff going on out there. So enjoy what we have, right? One of the things I love in my garden is my lavender. I have 17 lavender bushes around the side of my house among the roses and in the summer they are a sensory delight. I can stand by them and smell their fragrance, see hundreds of honeybees flying all through them, and hear the bees buzzing. Because I basically live in the country it’s pretty quiet and that many bees are loud! I just stood out there for several minutes yesterday while I was taking pictures and enjoyed that sensory overload. Yum!
I’m sharing the other photos I took and you can click on one to open them all in a gallery with descriptions and plant names.
Because I love gardening, I’m Paying It Forward to a garden blog I found recently called Home Garden Diggers. Yael has tons of interesting tips and information about all sorts of gardening topics. I’m actually quite amazed at how much great info she has archived here. If you like digging in the dirt, visit her blog, and click on the button below to visit Holly and all the other blogs that are being recognized this week.
Garden Report
“I was a writer long before I was a gardener. Like most writers, I’m in the habit of looking for interesting characters everywhere I go. So it’s no surprise that my garden is not the color-coordinated, beautifully designed, soothing outdoor space it could be. It’s more like a crowded bus terminal filled with people who have mysterious inner lives-unmentionable pasts and unknowable futures. The inhabitants of my garden are all characters in some horticultural novel written across the pages of my front yard”. –Amy Stewart, Sunset April 2009
I love this quote from Amy Stewart because even though I have good intentions of designing well, I really just want to plant what I love. So I design by putting some color contrasts in place, but I love everything there, so they are all a bunch of characters. Here are some lovely re-seeding biennial Canterbury Bells with Pink Friesland salvia hiding my new antique milk can, and some marigolds in front. (I simply adore Canterbury Bells!)
I started these Cherry Brandy Rudbeckia from seed last year and this year they are coming up great. The photo doesn’t really do justice to the lovely dark red and orange-red color. These are some of my favorites blooming right now.
My new antique iron wheel is set off by blooming purple catmint on the right, bee balm in the middle, and a really cool plant on the left called Redbirds in a Tree. See why my gardens are like a crowded bus terminal?
Now to the vegetables: keeping up with the garden without kids at home is harder, but doing it with a husband recuperating from rotator cuff surgery is really hard. I’ve despaired that we would get any vegetables this year, but with some serious weeding the last couple days I’ve found the vegetables. Yay! Turns out we’re going to get some after all. We’ve got tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, squash, beans, and potatoes going out there. I’ve included a photo Scott took of me repairing the irrigation ditches because he always gets amused at me playing farmer.
July Garden Report
After the super rainy June and cool beginning of July, it is now hot and the summer flowers are really happy. Blooming now:
Perennials:
columbine, lavender, rose, flowering strawberry, delphinium, 2 types of salvia, 2 types of coreopsis, 2 types of veronica, 3 types of sage, 3 types of gaillardia, potentilla, aubretia, hollyhock, lamium, scabiosa, 2 types of daylily, echinacia, daisy, catmint, Jupiter’s beard, scrophula, rudbeckia, rosemary, Sweet William, and tall garden phlox.
Annuals:
many types of sunflowers, alyssum, nicotiana, marigold, nasturtium, geranium, petunia, and annual salvia.
Gardening secrets
On Friday, Scott and I attended the annual Hidden Garden Benefit tour in Utah Valley. We try to go every year, and it benefits the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center. Each day before the tour, they have workshops that are included in your ticket price and we’ve never managed to get to one, so this year we worked it so we could attend. They were taught by Joy Bossi , who is a local radio and TV personality and professional gardener. She taught about edible landscapes, and mentioned nasturtiums as edible and also an attractor for pollinators. But she said they don’t transplant well and are impossible to start from seed. Then she asked if anyone had been successful in growing them and I timidly raised my hand, along with a couple others. So she asked me to tell what I do to raise them. I explained that I rub the seeds with a nail file, plant them in flats under clear plastic domes, and put them under my lights. Then I harden them off outside and plant them in my gardens. (Just like I do with all the other annuals, perennials, and vegetables I grow from seed each year, except the sanding.)
Well, you would have thought I was some genius gardener! Scott and I looked at each other rather dumbstruck. We laughed about it in the car on the way to the first home. Later in the day, we were stopped at one of the homes by an older couple who said, “Here’s the nasturtium expert.” So we chatted with them and gave them my “secret” to growing them. So now you know-I am one of the few who can grow nasturtiums. But I’ve never tried eating them.
More about my gardens: Because Brian and I were home all week, we worked in the gardens every morning until it started raining and have made great progress. All the flower beds except one are cleaned up, edged with rock, and newly planted with this year’s new plants, and they look great! Perennials blooming today: roses, poppies, columbine, salvia, iris, penstemon, lamium, and catmint.