My unfinished to-do list is growing longer every day and the blog has fallen by the wayside! I will try to keep caught up, because I have a massive photo backlog.
We've had an insane amount of rain.
The weather has been delightfully cool - 70s during the day and 50s at night (it was 57 degrees this morning when I woke up!). This is great for heat-hating humans like me, but terrible for small seedlings. I got fairly nice germination, at last, and then the rain and the cool...everything stagnated. And it's too late in the season to play more. Thankfully celosia filled in the holes in the annual garden, but it does look like I will mostly have a million pink celosia plants despite all my work this year...sigh.
One interesting garden anomaly...I did not plant sunflowers this year because it was so cool for so long and sunflowers hate cold, wet soil. I repeat: I didn't plant ONE SINGLE SUNFLOWER SEED. Sunflower seeds are large and distinctive...it's not like I could've planted them by mistake. Yet...dozens and dozens of sunflowers sprang up in my greenhouses. I used NEW soil that rarely had old soil from old greenhouses mixed in. This old soil sat outside in the freezing snow all winter long. Sunflower seeds do not last in weather like that. They rot easily, and our many little animals would've rooted out any that lasted. Squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, even birds. Yet...somehow...I have almost a hundred sunflowers.
I planted one last set of greenhouses last week and unbelievably, MORE sunflowers grew. How is this possible? Where are they coming from? Well, in a sea of hot pink celosia...I will take it.
At least the yellows have filled in in the perennial garden.
...and in all the other gardens around the house.
In front of the garage
one of the front-facing beds
I got the very last peonies this week for house bouquets. They didn't last long...they know that it's June.
Our tree frogs are LOVING all the rain.
Our wild animals are loving it, too, from new fawns to a gaggle of raccoons! :)
The spillway from our back pond to the forest streams that run from it are roaring loud all the time from so much rain!
A rabbit can have 40 babies in a breeding season, and we're seeing it!! These rabbits were playing in the side yard the other morning. It was too dark to get a good picture, though!
Wild strawberries are ripening...
...ditto with blackberries.
Lots of busy insects...
winged carpenter ant
fall webworm moths mating
chrysophilus velutinus mating
...and insects whose lives have run their course, like this fly infected with the entomophthora muscae fungus.
The name in Latin literally means "insect destroyer." It infects their brains, kills them, and compels the corpse to climb to a high location for maximum spore dispersal. Pretty cool!
The cold and wet has kept me out of the garden...and the rain has interrupted a lot of our walks.
Even bundled up in a sweater and wearing jeans yesterday, I 10000% prefer it to a normal Indiana June.
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