Wednesday, July 28, 2010

And the Heat is Upon Us

As expected, the weather went from constant rain to over 90F with little in between. There has been a frantic scramble to pull weeds and plant things- a scramble that is still not completed. I'm not sure we'll ever catch up this year. It's overcast today and we have the day off, so I'm hoping I can get most of the remaining annuals in and a lot of the weeds out. The weeds are so bad this year that by the time I get around the house weeding, the spot where I started is overgrown again. And with this heat, they are all going to seed.

Most of the roses look shabby right now, although some are starting to rebloom. The delphiniums are ragged; not quite done with their first bloom so I can't cut them back yet. The daylilies are what look best right now.
 This is "Double River Wye"- I think. I bought it as an orange double, and this was the only yellow double the vendor had at the time, so I made that assumption. I've gotten many, many misnamed plants from that person, and I never seem to find out until quite some time later.

We've been dividing iris like crazy; the other day we were at a job dividing iris when it started to thunder. We ignored it. Then the sky just opened up. It poured rain, it hailed huge nuggets, the dog ran, we ran under the garage lean to (with a pile of iris, so we could keep working) and waited it out, not that we could have gotten any wetter than we already were. It rained so hard on the metal roof that we couldn't hear each other talk, even yelling at each other. Even though it was still above 70F, I was shivering from being wet. Extra bonus: because we left the windows open when we left for work, everything by the windows on the west side of the house was soaked. Including a box of fabric. Yippee.

They cut the hay and got part of it baled today before it started raining- again. Now hopefully my allergies will back off!

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Summer may finally be here..

It's been a long, rainy month, one where everyone had work for us to do and we were taking care of the neighbor's alpaca farm, too. So our garden got grown over with well-watered weeds and we had no time to pull them, and the plants in the greenhouse grew tall and didn't get transplanted into baskets, bigger pots or the yard. Things are in an embarrassing state. But I think we may finally be through with the rain for awhile -next you'll see me complaining about the heat- and we should be able to get things under control a bit. The sky gave us a promise with our last rainstorm, anyway...