As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for In The Garden / Garden Buzz

Summer’s coming to an end

by

Join Green Thumb Sunday

Join

It seems that summer went by so fast and here we are at the second last day of summer! Did summer go by fast for you too?

Well either way, the garden is doing well. Roses, daisies, Asters, Sedum and many other plants are still blooming. Even my Hydrangea is still putting out a few blooms.

Pink Hydrangea 7

Our Raspberries are happy as well. They’re still producing berries! Just this afternoon my husband was out picking a small container of fresh raspberries off the plants. Yum. We’re just about to have them on some ice cream – double yum.

What’s blooming in your garden as we wind down to Autumn?






Ugh dead mouse in the garden

by

My husband has the day off work today and earlier this afternoon he suggested that we go outside into the backyard and just sit in the garden at our Patio table. Needless to say my laptop comes out with me when we do this (although the glare from the sun sure makes it hard to see!).

We’d done a little work in the garden the evening before and my husband had just cut the lawn prior to our visit to the garden this afternoon.

Shortly after I entered the garden I noticed that my dog was rolling around in the grass. I thought it was just because the lawn was freshly cut so I went over to pet her … and much to my disgust I saw a tail attached to a very rotted half mouse. EWWWWWWWWwwww.

I think my dog rolled in it! She doesn’t seem dirty or to have anything disgusting on her, but I’m pretty sure that she was rolling in the grass in that particular area because of the dead mouse. Labs are particularly fond of rolling in dead animals and other disgusting stuff.

I guess we’ll give her a bath later when we go inside. Now that’s a chore and a half.

I just hope that nobody put poison down and caused the mouse to die … ’cause if my dog tasted that mouse we might have a very sick dog on our hands!

Once the mouse was disposed of I brought my camera out and started taking pictures of the garden and some of the flowers that are currently blooming.

The flowers in bloom include white phlox, Climbing Iceberg Rose, Climbing Parade Rose, Compte de Chombord rose, Cleomes, Brown eyed Susans, a couple of Cannas, Malva, the Honey Suckle vine, Black Hollyhocks, Climbing Westerland rose, Baron Prevost Rose, Pink Salvia, Blue Salvia, Portulacas, Fuchsia, Gaillardia, Breath of Life Climbing rose, Valencia rose, Sedum, Petunias, Impatiens, Sweet William, Snapdragons and Balloon flowers. Then in the front there were several roses blooming – Climbing Eden, Standard Iceberg Rose, Yves Piaget Romatica Rose, Lavender Dreams, Bonica, The fairy and some others, plus Sunflowers, Cosmos and Morning Glory.

It sounds like there’s lots of roses in bloom from my list above, but that’s only about a third of my rose collection and of the roses that are blooming – some only have a few blooms while others like the Fairy and Bonica are covered in blooms.

Hopefully this evening I’ll have some time to upload and process the pictures that I took this afternoon and I’ll post them to this blog sometime this week.

What’s blooming or growing in your garden this week?

BTW Weather wise … can you believe that September has turned out to be warmer than July? Yeah … July was cold for these parts and September so far has just been a little warmer than average. Isn’t the weather getting stranger and stranger?

It’s been a lackluster gardening season – except for the tomatoes!

by

It’s been a strange gardening year.

On one hand I think I did more work in the garden this year than I have in the last two or three – in other words I was feeling a bit better and was more into getting my hands dirty and my arms scratched up by the roses, but then the weather was well … blah … more like a warm spring than summer, so the plants didn’t grow as well as I’d hoped earlier in the year and that put a damper on my garden enthusiasm.

It’s a stunted garden in some ways because of the cold July we had. My Cleomes are only just now starting to grow … they’ve reached maybe 3.5 to 4 feet in height where they should be about 6 feet tall by now.

My Tomatoes are possibly my best garden crop this year. In the past few years I’ve planted my tomatoes late, and well last summer was rainy and cold too so my tomatoes never really turned red. This year I planted them early enough that they grew well in June, stagnated in July with green fruit on the vine that wasn’t really growing and then come August the tomatoes really took off (as they should!).

We’ve been eating Tomatoes since maybe the first week of August (second at the latest) and it’s been great. There’s nothing better than a fresh tasty tomato right off the vine.

I’ve been eating tomato sandwiches, adding tomatoes to our salads and other foods and pretty soon I think I might try grilling some tomatoes or well maybe sauteing them as my sisters recipe calls for putting them in a frying pan (saute garlic in oil then cut a tomato in half and cook – apparently the garlic oil just goes right up into the tomato – delicious!).

I think I’ll also have enough tomatoes that I’ll be able to freeze some for tomato sauce.

I discovered a very easy way to freeze tomatoes a few years ago. Forget dropping them in boiling water to get the skin off before freezing. Just place whole tomatoes on a baking pan and place in the freezer. Let them freeze (while not touching other tomatoes) and then place them in a freezer bag. Later on when you thaw them the skins just slip off as they thaw and once thawed you can put them in a pot and start making a nice tomato sauce from scratch.

One thing that I must do soon is take some pictures of the garden and all the plants in bloom. For some reason I haven’t taken as many pictures this year as I usually do. I could be short on pictures for Green Thumb Sundays in the winter if I don’t start snapping away now!

How is your garden doing this week? What late summer/ fall flowers are blooming?

Meta