My Front Yard

 Playing with my toy drone, “aerial” photos of my front yard (taken from below the roof line of my house). The pix show off my wonderful fence to good advantage.

Vegetable Wrap-Up

 I cleaned up my single vegetable bed this week. I had planted broccoli, zucchini, cucumbers, beans, and chard. 

The broccoli was the star for the year. I had it tried once before, but the deer got to it and it was never appetizing. But this year, it was beautiful. I planted it in March, because it was the most interesting vegetable offered at Home Depot in my last shopping spree before locking down. After I harvested the main heads on each of the six plants, side shoots kept coming until sometime in  late July when I left it alone and the plants started to rot and die in the moisture and heat. I pulled the sad remnants out and tossed them.

The beans were a success, I guess. I planted two varieties from seed, and made three good harvests. Many of the plants were looking barely alive when I pulled them out just now, but I did get a sparse harvest off the dwindling plants. I’m not terribly enthusiastic because, unlike the broccoli, it wasn’t such a treat to eat them. I’m not sure I’ll give space to beans next year.

The cucumber was squeezed in where there really wasn’t room. I grew it up a trellis, and got one fruit. Then the plant died, possibly from my longtime and apparently still active zucchini curse. 

I squeezed the chard in between the broccoli and the zucchini, and got a meal‘s worth of leaves before they were overwhelmed by their neighbors. Definitely worth it. 

I planted maybe three different varieties of zucchini, both from plants and from seeds.  So far, I’ve harvested one single small zucchini. I have had a plethora of beautiful orange male zucchini blossoms, and few female ones. When I crawled around on the ground cleaning up the bed, several dead plants came away as I simply moved my hand along the ground. I tried to clean up all the dead and rotting matter, and it appears I may have a couple of actually (apparently) healthy zucchini plants in there. Except for some smallish basil plants on the edges, they are the only plants left in the bed and they seemed happy to be cleaned up and able to breathe freely. I discovered a female flower on one of the vines, and performed sex on it by dismembering a male blossom and smearing the pollen from the stamen on the hopefully receptive pistils. So maybe I’ll get a second zucchini! 

The dead squash and cucumbers probably were suffering from the squash vine borer- a drab moth that lays  its eggs on cucurbit vines. The caterpillars snack their way through the main stems of the plants, usually but not always killing the plant on their way. This has been the bane of my squash attempts, and I have never yet suffered from a surplus of zucchini. 

I have two cherry tomato plants in pots, and I continue to get a steady trickle of tomatoes. It would be more, but the deer have nibbled at them more than once, and they do not set fruit in the hottest weather. 

My Favorite Flower

 Love love love this dinner-plate hibiscus. I’ve yearned for this, and planted it four times. This one is a winner. It is a variety derived from a native, but there is noting natural about the proportions- I think it’s been bred for huge flowers on a relatively stocky plant. This is its second, bonus, flush of blooms and I’m totally smitten. 

Wildlife in the Garden

 Besides the usual deer and rabbits, there have been a host of interesting small critters in the garden.

This is a June Bug

The honeycomb left by my yellowjackets

Skipper 

Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly

A katydid. I thought it was just a “common” but then
some expert brandishing his credentials including a shiny new PhD
said it was something much more obscure.

The dark form of the Eastern Swallowtail

Pollinators, including bees, totally adore this verbesina.
I weeded a bunch of it out today, and bees rode it down into the 
Trash bag and came out later, startling me. 

Wet

It feels, right now, like it's been nothing but wet and grey for a long time. But, actually, if I cast my mind back just one weekend, last weekend was terrific - sunny, low humidity, cool enough to keep the air conditioning off and windows open.

However, it's not an illusion that it's been awfully wet this summer. We are currently neck-and-neck with 2018, our previous record holder for hyper-local precipitation. And, like that year, we're getting more and more huge events, rather than steady, consistent, precipitation. These downpours are much harder on our ground and systems. This week we had a really record-setting event. Our local gauge saw almost 3.5" in two hours. Other gauges around the region found even more - as much as 5.5"! Roads were flooded and closed, including the parkway just below my house.

All of this has led to huge growth of weeds everywhere. Right now, gardening feels like simply ripping things out. More on that later.

Late Summer Blooms

The garden is poking along during the dog days. Well, poking isn't the right word, because weeds are exploding, as we continue to have record-setting rainfall. But the blooms in the front shady garden (what I see most often out the window) are sparser and require a more refined esthetic than in the exuberant spring. But they are there!  And, the sunny parts are prolific and buzzing with pollinators. Soon, goldenrod will be the main thing, but not quite yet.

Garden phlox - surprisingly long-lived

Cardinal flower - I've seen hummingbirds here!

This is called "turtlehead" - can you see it?

This blue mistflower is something that just spreads itself,
sun and shade alike

Ironweed - nothing refined about this brawny guy

The white is a wild clematis that spreads itself -
I put this one on a pillar, but there is too much of it elsewhere