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Oh what a storm

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I really don’t know how the majority of my roses and flowers manage to stay mostly intact with all the rain and storms we’ve had this summer.

We just had a big rain and hail storm and yes there are petals littering the ground around my flower beds, but there are still a lot of flowers on my plants.

I guess I’ll just count myself lucky and cross my fingers as we’re expecting more storms!

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I took that photo while I was safely inside my enclosed back porch. It’s through the screen so it’s not as clear as it could be, but it’s not that bad. The vertical streaks are rain and hail. For some reason it never looks like it’s raining as hard in my backyard as it does in the front!

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The hail was literally bouncing off the ground and making large splashes!

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Speaking of hail … I managed to capture one as it fell:

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That while blurred blob in the red circle is a piece of hail. I’d say for the most part that the hail was approximately the size of M&M’s but that one looks bigger .. maybe grape size?

We’ve had more hail with our storms this summer than I can ever remember having! We’re lucky that the hail in this area has been rather small. Some areas (even other parts of Toronto) seem to get even larger hail – like golf ball size and as a result there’s been a lot of damage to cars and other objects this summer thanks to the massively sized hail!

I love how you can actually see the hail “trails” in this picture as it falls to the ground and lands on the grass.

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Have you had strange weather in your area this summer too?






Plants I thought I’d lost were just dormant for a few years

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I had a little bit of a surprise this year garden wise. You see there were some plants that I thought had died last year or the year before as they never came up in the spring. Well this year, after our long snowy winter I got a surprise … the Oriental Poppy in my front flower bed started growing again after at least two years absence.

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The flowers were huge and they were on stocks that seemed to be much longer than I remember them being in the past. I guess my poppy had a good rest.

I also have some daylilies coming up in the front that I haven’t seen for a two or three years. The front flower bed tends to be dry and I think there’s lots of roots in it from the huge maple tree in my neighbors yard, but as I said we had a very snowy winter and I believe all that moisture must have helped bring some dormant plants back to life again.

The backyard is alive with roses! I took some photos yesterday but I haven’t had time to transfer them to my computer yet. I’ll post them in a day or two though. My yard is almost gawdy now that there are so many roses blooming.

The chives are just about done blooming, but while they were in their prime I managed to take a photo on an industrious bumble bee collecting pollen from the chive flowers.

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Is your garden full of blooms right now too?

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