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!