a midsummer night's stroll

Hot hot heat!  Mornings and evenings are the best times for being outside right now.

Sometimes Todd and I will walk down to the pond after supper.  The fields are filling up with wildflowers after 2 years of battling invasive weeds and thistles.

We had the back of the field fenced...

...to try to keep out these guys.

We have a limestone-bed stream that runs along the back part of the property.  It's usually quiet, but swells up after a rain.

No prolonged gentle sprinkles here.  It's hot and dry, and then a torrential downpour will come...flatten everything and be gone in minutes.  These somewhat frequent mini-monsoons have caused the soil to erode from the sides of our bank, exposing the limestone beneath.

Todd found an eastern box turtle on a recent jaunt - the shell, anyway!

Love the geometric shapes.

I've seen it reproduced many times in clothing, like this knitted skirt.

photo courtesy of Norah Gaughan, Ravelry

We can see the effects of the weather in other places besides the stream banks.  I'm frequently seeing a slime mold, delightfully referred to as dog vomit fungus, in the garden. 

It's not really dangerous but does spread quickly, but at least it's easy to scrape up if you don't want to look at it!

Otherwise in the garden, poppies are somehow still going strong in the heat.

Ditto sweet peas.

Forget-me-nots and bupleurum, both cool-weather flowers, are somehow still doing well, too.

But the heat lovers are vying for attention.  Coneflowers are popping!

Celosia has self-seeded EVERYWHERE.

Shorter varieties of snapdragons are opening up, too!

Claudia loves helping me measure progress with her constant presence!

Here's hoping for more moderate temperatures and gentle rainfall.  Have a great week!

keep on keeping on

 Rats!!

Well, not in the literal sense.  This time, it's deer.  They jumped our fences and decapitated close to 130 sunflowers.  One hundred and thirty!  A pretty devastating morning with more than a few tears.

Then...a flash flood.  "Tornadic clouds" passed over and dumped over 5" of rain in just a few hours.  Thankfully, no real damage, but my poor garden went from this:

...to this.

Gardening is not for the faint at heart!  Thankfully, I was able to harvest from the wreckage.

Beautiful, mysterious poppies.

Sprawling nicotiana, with its angular, architectural structure:

Sweet peas...

...and so...many...snapdragons.

The color range is just amazing.

I am only missing blue and purple to make a full rainbow.  Thankfully, forget-me-nots and canterbury bells round it out for me.

Between the deer, the moles, the beetles, and the crazy weather - cool to blistering hot, drought to torrential downpours - the garden is in pretty poor shape.  But, it's not all bad.  After a week, many of my shorn sunflowers are showing new growth.  They'll be bushy and short, bit I think I will have flowers.

Tadpoles were discovered in a large outdoor bucket!

And many of my perennials are still standing tall.

No matter what condition the garden is in, we always have butterflies.

Our bee balm in particular is covered in these Great Spangled Frittilary butterflies.

So I'm going to ignore the weeds, try to shore up my flattened plants, and just keep picking.

Have a great week!

petticoat junction

For the past week, I've watched my fall-sown poppies crack open.  Would they be pink?  Purple?  White?  The buds slowly split, soon looking just like a Victorian lady's dress, with bustle and fancy ruffled petticoat.  The poppies are...red.

Red is a color that I don't use much in the garden.  I prefer soft pinks, cream, lavender, yellow.  But these are making a bold statement that I like more than I expected to!

I don't pick them for bouquets...just leave them in the garden to enjoy.  

The white flowers are nicotiana - flowering tobacco.  They have delightful lettuce-y leaves.

We've reached the part of the season of purely morning work.  With midday temperatures in the mid-90s, I have no interest in being outside.  At this point, the plants are on their own.  I do a little weeding, a little watering, but mainly, I leave them alone.  It's been damp and humid enough for some pretty nice mushroom colonies!

Hot and humid are the norm for an Indiana summer, and I'm just glad that we made it to mid-June before the heat really set in.  The extra-long cool spring provided a wonderful foundation for my "cool annuals," which are just starting to wind down.  The first of the "hots" - snapdragons! - are just beginning.   

I like being out in the early morning.

Dew dapples the new blooms.

I like seeing the new blooms, from flowers which were just theoretical the night before.  Paper seed packet pictures and a long, slow youth as identical green nubbins in the soil.  Then they burst open and are finally real!

As they bloom, they must be picked, or they'll go to seed.  I've been slow about ordering flower food - those little powder packets that come with store-bought bouquets - so mine only seem to last for 3-4 days.  Therefore I toss, toss, toss, and cut, cut, cut.  A couple of times per week...

I definitely have a soft spot for the aforementioned snapdragons.  They're a flower that I remember from my childhood, and they're long-blooming and vigorous.  And the colors!

There are early-, mid-, and late-blooming snapdragon varieties, and I've planted them all.  I can't wait to see what comes up!

The newly-plowed back garden is finally showing some growth.  At last!  I won't get any blooms for another month, but still exciting.  I've planted close to 140 sunflowers and many of them are here.

My new lens is still (and indefinitely) back-ordered.  This means that I can't take my usual insect/nature photos, which is tough.   Even though my subject material is now pretty limited, at least it's a pretty nice source material.

Have a great week!