merry berries

 Before our recent below-freezing cold snap...

new calendula bloom opening up

...my flowers continued to behave irrationally.

mint and euphorbia

Everything, up until a few days ago, was so green and even showing new growth!

butterfly bush

The morning glory vines were covered with new flowers.

Crazy!

We may have lost the green this week...but we still have plenty of red.

Berries, berries everywhere!

Even a few red leaves, too.

It's much too cold for Claudia outside.  We've moved her into the temperature-controlled barn for the week.

In past years, she was always eager to get back outside, no matter how cold it was.  But in her old age, she prefers to snuggle in a warm bed indoors.

Meanwhile, I finally completed a little project that's been a procrastination point this past six weeks.  I bought a skiing fox Christmas ornament.  Cute fox, ugly brown coat.  What a missed opportunity for something cheerful!

I cut off the coat...

...and just freehanded a little knitted project that took less than an hour, start to finish.  I knitted a piece of fabric to roughly match the size of his previous coat.  I decided that I'd rather have a fun blue bathrobe!  A frilly collar peeking out completed the look.

That's more like it!  Now he's ready for Christmas!  :)  

Have a great week!

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!