What a spring we have had...

Now that it is summer, I guess I should be writing about our wild spring. First, the weather stayed so cold for so long. We had our latest frost ever in May. We got our garden in so late that we only got one cutting of lettuce! The tomatoes are slow in growing, the sweet corn has been blown over and replanted so many times I doubt we harvest anything. I think you are catching my drift of how our spring progressed.

Next there were the storms! Oh such dreadful things. We have had torrential rains - 3+ inches at one time on multiple occasions. Wind- yes the wind normally blows a lot in the Midwest but with the storms it was awful. It blew down trees and power lines, the news stations cameras even caught the winds moving down the streets. Next was the hail...so many folks properties destroyed or badly damaged by the giant hailstones. Our automobiles battled the hailstones valiantly but lost as you can see in the photos.

This was one that went through daughters car - yes that is about tennis ball size.

 

 

Here is son's car. It by far got the worst of it with windows broken out, head lights, tail lights, interior and of course exterior. It even blew the wiper blades off the front of the car...or beat them off.

This is just a photo of one of the many flooding incidents in our driveway from the large quantities of rain in a short period of time.

 

 

Lastly and most sadly are the tornadoes that have hit. It was the first loss of life in 10 years in our state. There are many photos and videos on the Internet so I won't bother sharing here but it made me so sad for those folks. I pray for them and also ask why?

 

To end on a positive note, I am happy to say we have the cars back on the road and kids are happy and thankful to be driving again.  I am ready to move on to the warm summer days.

 

Evil bugs!

We had a mild winter so I should have expected it, yet it always seems to come as a surprise.
Bugs.
They have arrived in my garden with a vengeance.  They are eating and killing more than their share of garden goodies. Sure I will reluctantly share but when you bugs start taking over my garden I get upset and fight back!

I should say hubby has been fighting back. We have tried expensive sprays, reliable old Seven, and old fashioned squashing them under our shoes.  Still the bugs seem to be winning.

I had a beautiful melon plant with baby melons on it. It was the best melon I had ever grown.

DEAD!

Killed by a borer bug.




Those aren't the only evilness in my garden. We also have squash bugs and cucumber beetles. Summer squash - almost dead. Cucumbers - suffering.


Squash bug shown above.


Cucumber beetle shown above.

I don't know how I will get anything out of the garden with all these pests taking over but I guess we will keep trying. Everything I read on the bugs, is they are hard to control and eradicate.

Any ideas?

Flower gardening

I have been updating you on my vegetable garden and fruit trees but thought I would take a time out and show you some of my flowers.  These are just what happened to be blooming when I took the camera out and snapped some pictures. They constantly change as sometimes they take a break from blooming and others begin.  I don't have the offical names of most of these flowers so if you would like to comment and add names I'd appreciate it.


I'll comment on the ones I may know.  This first one is a moss rose.

 This is a gerber daisy.

 Another gerber daisy of a different color.

 A yellow clumping mini rose. This rose was almost dead last year and now this year it is doing really well. You just never know about plants.

 This is a late bloom on the amarillyis plant. I don't know if I spelled that correctly.

 A regular red rose. This particular plant is my most fragerant rose I have in my garden. The smell is AMAZING!

 These are climbing roses. I believe a vintage variety.

 This is a decentant of a cactus plant from my relatives in Palm Beach Florida. They had this in their yard and I brought it back.  This one fell off the original plant and began growing over the winter. Now it seems to be going crazy. I have good luck with succulent plants.

And these are some of my many Aloe Vera plants. Need some???? This started out from one 4 inch plant many years ago. Now I have them in 2 giant planters plus 6 or so smaller planters. Told you I could grow succulents.

How doth thy garden grow?

Isn't it amazing how quickly plants will grow if you leave them to just do their thing?


Garden update:

First we will start with the pond, which is a water garden to me.  You can see we have a small waterfall which a horrible algae bloom has taken place (grumble).  The lily is blooming but when I took this picture it was early morning and not quite out yet. It is a beautiful dark pink. I can see it peeking out in this photo but you have to know where to look. You can see the purple flowers in the foreground of a different water plant. The water iris are finished blooming. They are the tall reed looking things in the photo.  I need to get the algae under control and the pond will be great. We have the fish and some local frogs also in there.

Here is kind of a neat shot of one of my apple trees. The apples are doing OK. Not a lot of them but the ones we have are growing nicely. I liked this shot as the apples are still small.

This shot is blurry but I wanted to get close and show you how blackberries start out. Our bushes are just loaded with fruit. I can't wait to show you how big and different they look when ready to pick!  Some are still blooming as you can see at the bottom of the photo. (white flowers)

Next we have our peach trees. How many peaches can you see? I count 5 in this span of 6 inches or so. The trees are loaded with fruit. We have a lot that drops off but you can see how large they are getting all ready. I can't imagine how big they will be in another month. It kind of scares me as peaches have such soft wood that the trees break easily. Last year we lost over half of our smallest and newest tree.  I will be keeping my fingers crossed for no big wind storms to hurt these delicate trees.

Here we are finally to the vegetable garden. This is an overall shot showing potatoes on the left, sweet corn on the right, cucumbers and onions in the back. All doing fairly well.

Here are the potatoes and onions with a couple sunflowers.  I read the kids a book about the giant in the back yard - at the end of the book you discover it is a sunflower. Fun book and it makes me smile at the sunflowers towering over the garden keeping watch.

This shot is sweetcorn in foreground, tomatoes and peppers on the upper right and upper left is supposed to be carrots...I haven't seen any yet so I don't know if they will appear or not. Still hoping.  Our green beans are an epic failure. We have planted twice and the seeds keep rotting in the ground. Big sad face. I have no idea why that is happening this year.

I love my gardens and yard as you can tell. I'll try to keep doing updates this summer. I hope you enjoy following my garden as much as I like blogging about it!

Garden time

Yes I know I should NOT let my vegetable garden go weeks without attention. This tangle of weeds is the result. Way at the far end of this mess you can see my pretty clump of chives but other than that - HIDEOUS.

We started Friday night. After a quick dinner, I said let's head out and start on the garden because I knew it was going to take a long time to fix. We started by weeding the potatoes. The weeds were taller than the potatoes so it needed serious work. Plus after potatoes are up you need to mulch them with straw.  We were approximately 1/2 way done weeding when rumble rumble (thunder). I looked up at the sky and said "REALLY?" This is the ONLY weekend I have to work on our vegetable garden so if you want me to feed my family please hold off on the rain.  The response? More rumbling. I told hubby to pull faster and start putting down the straw. So he is putting down the straw and we run out! I finish frantically pulling as the lightning starts to kick in. We rush into the house to more rumblings. I was shown who is boss...

Fast forward to the next morning. We had an early morning rain shower but by noon it had cleared up and heated up. Boy was it H-O-T! We dug in on weeding, mulching and planting. Here is a section of garden we previously had planted. I weeded and mulched the radish, lettuce, onion, and garlic plants. Looking better.

Approximately 5 1/2 hours later of solid work by hubby and I we finally planted the last kernel of sweet corn.  So in addition to what was mentioned above and the sweet corn. We also have green squash, yellow squash, honeydew melon, cucumbers, green beans, beets, two kinds of tomatoes, 2 kinds of peppers, and carrots.  Can you say exhausted? Neither one of us could hardly move and I acquired a nasty sunburn on my back. Look at the final product. Looks pretty nice right now!

I made a nice bucket of adult beverages and we rested on the deck while drinking them. We then went out for dinner as neither one of us could cook a thing. We have been on Advil for a couple days now trying to work out the kinks in our backs, necks, arms, legs.  I will try to update the garden topic occasionally throughout the year as it takes a LOT of our time.  The fresh produce is very worth it though for healthy eating.