Color UNcoordinated

I can dress myself - and even match colors. I swear, I can.

But when it comes to my flowers, I can't help it. I LIKE red and purple together. Pink and orange play off each other in an odd but rather fantastic way. My orange and maroon blanket flower and deep purple buddleia look fab caressing each others blooms.

My crayon garden runneth over. And I don't care! I absolutely adore it, just the way it is.

Honestly, I've found that people notice the individual plants much, much more when they clash. It's the oddest thing, but they do. Smaller flowers, even with the brightest colors, are usually passed by unnoticed. Clash 'em and they stick out like sore thumbs in a "look at me" sort of way. People wander down the paths a lot more slowly now and really see each plant and I wonder if this is why. Stick some toad flax next to a hosta and I swear, the sucker glows! My purple salvia is overjoyed to be cozily nestled next to the red bee balm.

In my big containers the WS'd purple petunias are absolutely illuminated next to the orange and red marigolds topped by mauve and yellow snaps. And it not only all works together, but is a stunner!

Can you tell I have a thing with purple and red?

I dumped a box of colors on the soil and my crayon garden is fab! I will never worry about coordinating colors again. Ever!

Sometimes I Really Hate Summer

Ooo, did I say that out loud? Ok, I didn't mean it...really! I just hate dry. Dry, dry, dry. Grrr.
It rained yesterday. Or so I thought.

I wandered off to the garden all smiles this morning figuring the wet ground would finally make it a little easier to yank those weeds outta the ground. Well, the paths were, ummm, moist, but as soon as I reached under a plant - dry as a freaking bone!

Alright, so this on and off sprinkle crap all day did absolutely nothing but ruin the 4th. We had tuna noodle for dinner for pete sake. On the local weather blog, people have finally begun to notice what I've been compaining about for forever = the rain keeps splitting in two to our east - half heading south, the other half heading north, and us stuck in the tiny crappy dry circle in the center. What's wrong with this picture? Watching the local radar right now, that's exactly what it's doing again today! :( The water table underneath us is ridiculously low, and our stream has all but dried up. I hope the well schedule keeps holding - that sucker is low.

Goings On

Or maybe not so goings on.

No rain - the well is sooo low :( It's been a toss-up schedule of laundry, dishes, showers, watering the flowerbeds, watering the veg and water changes on the pond. Where's the rain?!

The temps plummeted to 41 degrees last night, and it's suppose to top out in the low 60's today. Yeesh, where's summer? Everyone's bumming that it's suppose to be nasty weather on the 4th with thunder boomers and rain, and I'm doing the happy dance!! :) Ok, lesson learned = when people are hoping for spot-on fab weather for a holiday, don NOT publicly announce your wishes to the contrary. If looks could kill I'd have woken up dead this morning!

WS'd petunias bloomed, and so have the marigolds and a few cosmos. Yay! Lots of bud on the pepper plants and one lonely pepper meandering along. The brussel sprouts have tiny little buds along the stems and the cauliflower are small - but in there. I pulled the very first cabbage from the garden and made cabbage salad. OMG - it was so crispy and sweet! People say it all the time, but it's so true - fresh from the garden tastes so much better. Top broccoli have all been harvested, just waiting now on the side shoots.

D is taking care of 3 of her own toms this year and they're looking wonderful. As long as she keeps on with the watering they should do just fine. I can't wait for her to take that first bite of the tom she grew all by herself!

Bush beans are bushing (the ones the deer didn't eat the tops of) the pole beans are, well ... poleing :) The bee balm has almost opened.

Everything would still be looking so much better with a good soaking rain!

Chipmunk count at 15 with new zip codes. Heh.

Perception Of My Garden

This passage from The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields sums up, not only the garden I'd love to eventually have, but how I feel about it at this particular moment in time.

"(Her) garden, these good friends claim, is so fragrant, verdant, and peaceful, so enchanting in its look of settledness and its caressing movements of shade and light, that entering it is to leave the troubles of the world behnd. Visitors standing in this garden sometimes feel their hearts lock into place for an instant, and experience blurred primal visions of creation - Eden itself, paradise indeed.

It is, you might almost say, her child, her dearest child, the most beautiful of her offspring, obedient but posessing the fullness of its spaces, its stubborn vegetable will. She may yearn to know the true state of the garden, but she wants even more to be part of its myteries. She understands, perhaps, a quarter of its green secrets, no more. In turn it perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing - which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, as every leaf, every stem, every root and sign."

Oh, to have a garden like that!

Such A Joy To Be Outside

A couple days of 90 degrees and everything goes gangbusters.

Some WS'd petunias have buds on them...finally! Marigolds are growing at an unbelievable rate, after sitting at a standstill for what seems ages. The Toad Flax is blooming. (thanks Don!) It is sooo cute! The WS's crackerjack marigolds I planted in the containers by the pond are blooming. :-) The butterfly weed seeds Sissy sent are ever so slowly growing. (I don't know what I'm doing wrong with them!) And I got one Datura from the seed she sent, which surprised me - I figured I'd get none at all. It's a good foot and a half tall and bushier than anybody's business!

My husband is a genius. Of course, since we hit 90 and there's no water to do a water change in the pond - the koi spawned. ~sigh~ WHY, for pete sake, why? Not that I wouldn't be happy to see a few babies, but not when they make such a friggin mess and the ammonia skyrockets. Ugh! Anyway, D figured out how to finagle a sort of 'fry coral/playpen thingy before the big piggers could slurp all the eggs up. He slapped together some pvc pipe he had left over from the pipes bursting last winter, and I cut and sewed an old curtain into a rectangle that we slid over the frame, added some extra pieces of pipe insulation foam and voila!...a floating egg/baby fry containment system. I've got the frog spitter aimed into a corner of it for oxygen and a little water movement. Heh, the big boys aren't to happy their banquet moved to an unreachable spot. Tough! Hopefully there won't be too many hatchlings. The consensus seems to be that they do much better in the pond than they do when they're brought in to an aquarium, so we'll see. I'm really glad we figured out this setup, because no way did I want to deal with setting up an aquarium and doing water changes every day. This way, with the clean spitter water going in at one end and the ammonia exiting (pretty much everywhere), it's a constant water change.

The pepper plants are more than happy with this mini heat wave. They're turning into bushes! There are tiny toms on all the tomato plants. Only one of the zucchini seeds Kim sent germinated, but we all know what you can get from just one, so I'm happy! I guess I just had to be a bit more patient with the broccoli - the heads have gotten huge! The cabbages are coming along great, and the brussel sprout plants are hip high! Man, are they gonna be something when they start producing! The watermelon germed better than I expected, though they had a setback with the chilly weather earlier last week. And the Once In A Blue Moon pumpkin seeds Kim sent are going nuts! I can't wait to see how they do! And the cukes are really happy campers as well.

The parsley that didn't really do much last year (I'd purposely planted them for the butterflies) but has grown into a monster shrub this year and is covered with butterfly caterpillars. They've eaten most of the top 2/3, and I'm hoping they'll be enough to hold out for them. All the butterfly bushes are doing fab! The last couple days of major heat and humidity have given them a grand boost.

The inpatiens that I wintered over are really looking nice and bushy, and finally putting on a nice bloom. I grabbed a few Siberian Iris that someone had put beside the road for free, and I know where I want them to go, but I can't get them in the ground just yet - a golden finch decided to build her nest in the wild raspberry bush ouside the bathroom window and I don't want to disturb her or the babies. They're so cute! They're the only baby birds I've ever seen that don't make any noise when you come near the nest - just gawk with their mouths wide open. How funny they are. :-)

The bee balm is budding and almost ready to bloom, the nasteriums are huge and loaded with color. I think my favs are the striped yellow and orange. Ok, maybe the deep maroon. Well, I really like those pale yellow...oh, I love 'em all!

And the Moonflower vines are doing very, very well. I can't wait to see blooms!

It took me a week, yes, a week to weed between the sones in the pathway, even with DD's help. (I was absolutely shocked she wanted to!) I'd really like to fill them with something, but I don't think I've ever seen seeds for Baby Tears or Corinthian Mint. I certainly couldn't afford to buy them. That's quite a bit to cover. Besides, I've heard Baby Tears have a nasty habit of being invasive and I will soooo never plant anything that is invasive ever, ever again! Uh-uh!

Things are looking better, bushier and lovely. I spend every single spare second I can find out there and it's good to be ouside these days...even with the daily watering. But, that way I get to really see what's going on up close, enjoy the growth and the beauty, and talk sweetly to everything telling it how wonderful it looks. Shhh! My neighbors probably already think I'm nuts...