Wild and cultivated flowers are flourishing! This Queen Anne's Lace is bigger than my hand...HUGE compared to it's usual size....and then...
...the hydrangea's are stunning this year. These are my neighbors, I'll post a pic of mine tomorrow. Mine are more purpley-blue, and my bush has had it's best year, ever. I usually get 2-3 flower heads, this year I have more than 15 and they're still coming!! Awesome!
Today is very hot and humid already. Walked the dog (into my 2nd week of morning walks as both the dog and I need to un-chub!) early to 'beat the heat'. The air quality sucks. We have music and movement class today, the little folks and I, and then we head to Friendlies for breakfast-for-lunch. We take a long winding backroad home, takes about 30 minutes, but we see all kinds of neat things. Last time we saw turkeys and the time before, a coyote at the edge of a plowed field.
Our community garden is doing well, despite the weather. We have 31 tomato plants up there, and some "Indian" corn. None of the squashes sprouted (no surprise as we had 12 consecutive days of rain). But the tomato's are doing well and I look forward to canning, likely sometime in September at this point! Huh. Last year at this time I'd done my first batches of salsa and stewed tomato's. One gardener and I joked that we'd be harvesting our first tomato's around Halloween!
I'm trying paste tomato's for the first time, have 5 or 6 plants of them, as well as several "eating" varieties (early girl, lol!) which also wind up in my spag. sauce. The heirloom's haven't got fruit on the vine as yet, but they are late producers anyway. If frost holds off late this year, I may have a chance of getting a few of them in. sigh. Well the garden looks good, anyway. I'll go up there tonight and hopefully remember the camera this time so you can see it.
I will say that all the rain of late has certainly created a deep, tropic-like lushness in our yard. We won't mention that the weeds are thriving right along with the plants, right? But this close up is of the botom step into the backyard...the stone steps are peeking out like a narrow corridor through the green verge...
...laying on the grass in the backyard, and looking up those steps...they look like they've been there for 100 years, when it's only been since the mid-80's that we redid the backyard and these steps.
Lee planted this gorgeous hybiscus this spring in my mothers favorite planter. I LOVE this look, the brilliant yellow with the blue pottery.
We've had sun twice this week! This was yesterday...we never got rain from these gorgeous sky-galleons as they sailed on eastward, but they sure were gorgeous to look at.
Here's a closer image of one of those clouds. The "T" on the bottom left is an antenna on the roof of the house up the street from us. And the sky was such a deep intense blue....so nice to see blue skies instead of the gray we've become accustomed to this summer. What I couldn't capture was the small flock of chimney swifts that were stitching across the sky, darting back and forth, and reminding me of quilters needles flashing into and out of a quilt, lacing layers together.
