Last night the rain came, and I had a little water caught in the freshly emptied storage barrels.
"The ground will be soft," I thought. Instead, the ground was dry and my magical shovel found tree roots near the surface. Nevertheless, it was fun planting from Almost Eden's nursery.
I added more coreopsis for beneficial insects.
I learned that the Chaste Tree is very much like Butterfly Bush and perhaps even better at attracting pollinators. I have a total of three Chaste Trees and five Butterfly Bushes.
I could not decide where to put the elderberries in the new, expanded wild garden. They are the tallest ones at the moment and I want to place them where they will catch the sun and show off their flowers and fruits.
Sunflowers are blooming. I was outside when a flash of gold fluttered by. It was a male goldfinch checking out the food available on the sunflowers. The blooms face East so we are looking at the cheerful flowers when we look into the backyard.
Pumpkins are vining and one bloom already popped out. They take forever to get going and seem to be unstoppable toward the end of the season.
Corn germinated very late and grew in the sunniest part of the corn patch. I learned my lesson about waiting to plant and giving them more time to germinate. The holes I saw after planting were from the squirrels retrieving their food. They are as suspicious of me as I am of them. I should have known that they left those holes because they were retrieving the old stashes of food.
Our beans are not as plentiful as the number of seeds planted. Rabbits probably munched their way through many of the early plants. The rabbits are especially abundant this year. Sassy followed a baby bunny until it hopped under a car.
We are seeing the benefits of last year's work, with laying down mulch and starting the earthworms.
Spring was too cold and too wet but the trees were trimmed to give us adequate sun in the front and back.
The new roses have been surprisingly productive already.
As I wrote before the pure white John Paul II roses were clobbered by insects. Now they are the most productive and also damage free. I cut roses for Mrs. Ichabod and found one perfect John Paul II among the others, which were also beautiful.
I pulled out the cut cane and there was a dense spider web. I laid God's little insect killer back onto the bush. He gave me a perfect rose because I let him find his food without being poisoned.
 |
| The crepe myrtle bush is blooming and the calladiums below are spreading - same color. |
