Little yellow rose is still hanging on, I don't know if its going to make it another year...












Here is a new rose, smells wonderful and the colour is very nice, I don't want to plant this guy until he is done flowering.


















Some lilies from our flower bed out front, I missed out on bringing them in last year; a mistake I won't make again. They have an intoxicating aroma and I have one bunch in the living room and another in Lacy's room.








Three pots of the venus flytrap stayed inside in their terraruim while another smaller pot went outside to join my two pitcher plants. We are going to have quite the carnivorous bog, but that is a plan for another day.










Here are the three bromeliad pups with the venus flytrap in the background and some african violets. All the indoor plants are doing very well.











I just picked up this hydrangea at Trader Joe's its not too big right now but hopefully will be a ten foot bush eventually. When he came home he was a light blue colour but with the acidity of the mulch, added coffee grounds, and planting him near an evergreen bush its turning a very nice shade of violet.






The climbing lily starts out with the yellow framing around the red petals and then they mature to a deep bright red without any yellow at all. They are gorgeous! But not 6' tall :(










This is one of the free tomatoes from SSCC. I believe this one is for making paste.

















Yay more zucchinis! The zucchini plant is huge this year.












We now have beans, this one here is a yellow wax bean. Pretty tasty!


















and some purple bush beans again this year - they are so pretty!
















The grapes on the fence are doing really well too, Lacy is excited to eat them!

















Look! The cabbage is finally starting to get a head on it. The spider living in the middle must be doing it's job to keep the cabbage moth larvae away.











These are some type of giant 'crazy' squash that I got from Jarett's (the NGP) mom. We're not sure what type they are but apparently they are large and have green flesh. The leaves are easily twice the size of the other squash.
















Our potatoes are growing really fast! As soon as they get another 4" tall or so we will add more dirt and unroll the bags a bit. We think this will be in about 2 more days. We are thinking of building a frame around the bags so that they don't fall over when fully unrolled and so that we can add another bag on top if they keep growing up. We might have a LOT of potatoes this winter!














This is another tomato bed it hasn't filled out entirely yet, it's 6 free tomatoes from SSCC and the front row I grew from seed.







The raised beds look awesome!












These are some of the peppers from SSCC, that we got for free to add to our container garden.













Our container pepper garden including the banana and bell peppers that I grew from seed. I have planted a few peppers in the ground just for comparison and its nice to know that my instincts were right, they are doing much better in the containers.














See the size of those tomato plants? Some of them are up to our waists. They all have flowers but none of the ones grown from seeds have fruits, yet.

....yay? sunshine!

Wow.  to expand on my last post summer has arrived with a 20 degree jump in temperature overnight.  We've gone from mid 70's (or lower!) to mid 90's.  It is HOT!  The garden is loving it - the tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini have visibly grown over the last 2 days and I'm sure we will see even more growth in the rest of the garden.  Jen just planted more seeds yesterday: bush beans, summer squash, spaghetti squash and a crazy squash (Just what IS a crazy squash?!?).  Hopefully these will all come up soon.

The chicken run door is finally built - I borrowed a jigsaw and a speed square from the tool library and even made the awesome mitered corners on the door frame and made braces with other scrap wood so it would stay square then covered it with mesh and cross brace.  All that we need now is to buy the hinges. Funny thing about building is that when something is only a 1/4" off of square (say a doorjam) it makes a huge difference in building a door.  I cut our door a 1/2" narrower than the doorjam but since it didn't entirely work  apparently it would have been better if there was a 1" difference width wise.  Who knew it made such a difference?!?  oh well, the door still works and is nice and square - it just looks odd without a square door jam.  I think I put enough braces in that it won't warp with the sun too.  Once the door is installed the run will be complete!!!

Now that most of the major projects are done I'm already off to thinking about more projects: widen the tomato bed for next year?  plant a wisteria vine on the fence? clean out the basement and make space to hang the potatoes, onions and garlic I hope to have this fall?  dig out new flower beds along the front walk and fill with bulbs, daylilies, crocosmia and peonies?  Plant more blueberries and maybe an apple tree?

Not sure what all of that we will do, I've got the wisteria vine in a bucket of water to see if it will root, planning on cleaning out the basement this next week and I will be keeping my eyes open for blueberries on sale.  We've been talking about getting some baby ducks when they are available at the feed store so we'll have to find a place to put their pool.  We found several smaller varieties we liked online but we'll probably buy whatever we can get locally so we don't have to order them online.  I don't like the idea of ordering animals through the mail - it just seems cruel especially in our hot weather right now.

We will have to update with some new pictures tomorrow.  Oh - and in some other good news the hot weather is killing the aphids infecting the plum tree, hopefully it will recover soon.