Wednesday

 A great day to do it again.  When healthy, every day should see a positive contribution to something!  I started the day with "What needs to happen today"?  And once again I only looked outside.  There is a wonderful little flower that creates interesting seed pods balls called Love In A Mist. I posted a picture earlier in the year. It's an early bloomer that self-seeds.  I helped that process with a whole lot of extra seeding done by hand last summer.  They were everywhere but starting to look a little ragged.  This morning the garbage truck took a lot of them somewhere.  Not all but a lot.  It was time to clean up, read up, spruce up, and make a change.  So now some of the space they occupied looks like this. 

                                            Eight calendula are filling the space.                                                                                          A few Love in the Mist plants are on the right side of the picture.                                                          The round balls are the seed pods. They are very easy flowers to grow. 

I trimmed some Rebeckia or Black-Eyed Susans.  Trimming them now causes them to be shorter when blooming which prevents flopping.  I dug another bunch out and filled that bed with more zinnia and calendula plants.  I hope to draw in the butterflies with color in the garden beds. 

                                            This old Susan bed can hold nothing more.                                                              Now it's waiting for all the little plants to grow into big colorful attractions for the butterflies. This bed has three struggling Bears Britches, Zinnias, Calendula, Tobacco plants, one Stella Dora daylily, ornamental grass and a few Susans at the far end. 

Our lawn mower men came today and I realized that some trees needed trimming to make their job easier.  So Doug did the trimming and the bed in this area is now a bit more visible with more light..

        I'm experimenting with a few things here.  Namely, will the Hens and Chickens be happy here?

I think they are adjusting to the shade but I'm keeping my eye on them. There are other places for them.

Today the big garden gave up a few calendulas for other places.  I checked the tomato plants and did a bit of thinning of green leaves. The early spring helped these little tomatoes along.  Remember those hot days this spring?  I do. Tomatoes and Peppers LOVE the heat. 

All the coral bell flowers were looking tired.  The tops get heavy and the stems just get tired of holding them up. So...another place to trim up and fuss with a bit.  I found Larkspurs.  Three of them.  I wish there would be one year when I have a whole bunch of them.  The color is so blue and the flower so simple.  I think of England gardens for some reason.  They just volunteer their presence in the flower bed.  

So today you have a little tour of some of the beds in the garden.  A place where my plant friends are showing their stuff at some point in the summer months. That is if the deer don't party during the night.  I keep spraying and hoping and sometimes winning and sometimes not.  They visited last night with a nibble here and there. All God's creatures need to find their nitch if only we will let them.  They were here first.