Summer Rains

 We have entered a rainy period which is fine.  It cuts down on worry about how the plants are coping with high heat and turns your focus to tidying up every day.  I just cleaned these Petunia planters up yesterday morning.

That's the thing about traditional Petunias.  They don't handle rain well.  The deep purple blooms shed water and seem to hold up the best, especially the first couple of days.

The red ones - not so much.

At least they aren't white, which would be translucent and ultra icky.  No matter.  They need to be dead headed anyway so they don't set seed and quit blooming.  I just have to wait for the plant to dry out a little.  You ought to see my fingers after 10 minutes of Petunia trimming.  Thankfully, Hydrangea flowers don't do that.  

Little Lime Punch Hydrangea (planted 2024)

Little Quick Fire Hydrangea (planted last month)

The thing about rain is that it gives all of the weeds a quick boost.  You will come out in the morning and an area which looked fine yesterday will have all of these happy little weeds.  Below is the pea bed that was mulched.  It won't take long to pull these weeds, especially with moist soil.

Eww!  This pea bed with no mulch is a different story!  Purslane!  The best way to deal with this is to pull the more mature plants at the far end and then rake over it with a garden rake uprooting all of those tiny babies.  I will leave the garden rake right there and every time I walk past I will take 30 seconds to rake it again so that the roots dry up and die.  A nice hot, sunny afternoon would help cook them.

Here is a little update on the grape vines.  The first one is growing like crazy.  It has a really nice growth habit that will easily lend itself to a multiple vertical cordon style.

In the spring, I will prune it as diagramed below.

Right now I am just making sure I tie up the stems that I want to turn into cordons so they are protected and will harden into the form I want.

The second vine has one main leader.

It may require a different form just because it fits this particular vine's growth habit.  Maybe next year's growth will provide what I need for two opposing cordons.   We shall see.  It's kind of fun.

Mid-Season Landscape Maintenance - additional work done today

 Today is our second day in a row of cooler and drizzy weather.  We got a little rain which revived some of the tired out perennials but did nothing for the rainwater tank.  It was a good day to catch up on weeding because the rain had softened the ground, and it wasn't radiating heat back up at me.

I pulled about ten pounds of weeds (seriously) from two of the landscape beds then decided to refresh the edging while I was at it.

I used a transplant spade to cut the grass at the edge then pulled it up and swished the mulch around.

This bed I call the "Spring Garden" because it is full of Daffodils and Primrose.  When we mulch in the spring it is difficult to mulch closely around the Daffodil foliage.  When I cut the foliage back the weeds start in the thin mulch around the bulbs so after I pulled all of them I went ahead and dumped some mulch on those thin spots.  That way the weeds won't come back this season.

I walk along this bed every day and it is easily visible from the house windows so having a fresh edge and nice mulch makes a big impact.

Here are some more pictures of bright spots in the garden.

Echinacea Cantaloupe 

Hosta

Cardinal Flower

Profusion Apricot Zinnia

Licorice Plant, Sweetunia Black Satin and Rediculous Coleus

Some of my tall, decorative Dahlias are ready to bloom which is about two weeks earlier than usual.

Bloomquist Gordon Dahlia

**FOOTNOTE:  Today I tackled edging the area I call "The Warf".  We have a few edges in our landscape that are two inch washed stone against grass.  These require edging every three to five years which is a lot better than shredded bark mulch which must be edged at least every year and some, twice a year. For the first couple of years you can neaten it up with a string trimmer, or just pull the quack grass and white clover away, but every once in awhile it needs a reset.  This was on my agenda but my husband pitched in because cutting edges along stone can be a beast.  It looks nice when you are done though.  The sod pulled up enough stone that we had to refresh that a bit.

And then since everything was done on either side, I cut the edge along the flagstone.

You can see the mud line along the stones where the grass had encroached.

Whew!

Weeding

 I finally got around to some weeding today.  I weeded the Cole Crop bed in preparation for mulching it with shredded leaves.  The Cabbages are beginning to form heads and the Romaine Lettuces at each corner are of a useful size with three or four smaller ones interspersed for later harvest.

Next I need to weed the Blackberry bed and mulch that too.  The thornless Black Raspberry plant finally arrived to join the thornless Blackberries that I planted last fall.

My Tickled Pink red grape vine is finally putting out some leaves thanks to those two days of hot weather.  The  white grape is alive and has tiny green buds on it but still no leaves.

I have begun prepping the bed for the Tomato Plants but will wait until this weekend to plant them.  I have two Perpetuo variegated Basil plants on the end, and Candy onions along the sides.  I have seeded more Candy onions for a later crop.

The first and second plantings of peas need to be weeded also.  Those are not all lettuce seedlings along the sides.

Many Peppers and Tomatoes still to plant and distribute and some experimental Marigold cuttings.

I seeded Cucumbers and Summer Squash inside and placed them under a grow light since everything is still set up in the workshop.  As soon as the cotyledons appear I will relocate them to the cold frame to grow in the sunshine.

Laster yesterday afternoon when I wend out to close down the cold frame I noticed that one of my transplanted Coleus had snapped, maybe in the wind.  I didn't notice any damage as I was planting.  I brought the "cutting" inside and put it in water to watch it root.  I can always use one more Coleus...

Shifting Things

 I have dug up and removed a lot of my Daylilies just because they take so much effort to protect from the deer.  I have saved a few of my favorites.  I saved four of these "Big Smile" daylilies up near the house.  They are one of the last varieties to bloom and they are right along the driveway so the protection season for them is long and strenuous.  But they are worth it.

The easiest way to protect them is to keep a couple of these "Pest Guard" mesh plant covers on them.  In the evening I go out and cover the plants, securing the cover with an Earth Staple or two.  In the morning I collect them up and stack them in a dark corner nearby.  Easy peasy.

But one of the Daylilies was too close to this Bird's Nest Alberta shrub.  I had a note in my spring to-do-list to shift it over.  This is an easy job when the plant is dormant and the ground is soft.

I just dig out the soil where I want the clump slid to, dumping the soil in a trug.

Then I cut the roots around in a large circle to avoid disturbing them too much and use the spade to leverage the whole thing to the right tight against the edge of the new hole.   If your plant has any deep tap roots it may even move over without breaking them.   Then I dump the soil out of the trug and firm it in.  Done.  Plant shifted.  And if you do this on a rainy day, you don't even have to go get any water to water them in.  We had almost an inch of rain the evening after I moved this.

The wet spring is also a great time to pull grass or weeds out of your ground cover.  Dandelions and grass are always weeks ahead of most perennials.  Its the perfect time to spot them and remove them before they get lost in the plants.  If you accidentally pull up any of your ground cover you just replant it right there.

Rye grass was starting to take over the Snow on the Mountain.

Soon the Snow on the Mountain will fill in and the grass would have been inaccessible.

Here is a look at some of my spring flowers.

Poison Ivy Progress

 No more berries from these guys.

Poison Ivy

I am very tired of Poison Ivy.  This vine pictured below is our main culprit in spreading it everywhere because it is so mature and is covered with berries every fall.  Then the birds eat them and poop the seeds all over the place!

Not a day goes by that I don't find a bunch more seedlings to pull or spray.  It is my number one most prevalent weed in the landscape.

Its in the mulch

Its in the ground cover

Its on the deck.

And those are just what I found walking around in five minutes when I realized "I need some photos to illustrate this"...  after pulling and spraying all week.

That vine doesn't look like such a big deal until you put a person beside it for scale.  It has engulfed the entire dead Ash tree and forty feet up.  Luckily the next door neighbor is not allergic to it (yet).  So he gets elected to deal with it whenever we are cutting trees.  Neither my husband nor I will ever pick up the neighbor's chain saw.  And just watching gives us the heebie jeebies.

About the only thing you can do with a vine this big is try to cut off its food and hope it stops thriving and eventually dies.  The main root has a million little hair roots that cling to the tree bark and get moisture from the surface.  We decided to try cutting out a section of the roots to see if we can at least discourage it.

That's not the only dead Ash tree we have that is covered in Ivy.

We had a go at several others.

Neighbor Mike pulls out a section of root.  And it looks like there is a hunk right out of the tree.  But that is just Ivy root.

Poison Ivy is pretty hard to discourage.  I'll let you know if the leaves ever begin to wilt.