Almost Midsummer

Things are popping! Last year's perennial bed, in a photo taken yesterday. The swamp milkweed is looking great, and hopefully this year, regular applications of Neem will prevent the aphids from sucking the life out of all of the flowers. Behind them, the coneflowers are just absolute monsters, some of them must be four feet tall! Not pictured off to the left are the Prairie Smoke plants, which had a beautiful light blue bloom and are much bigger/bushier than I was expecting. I was saying to Sean that one of my challenges in "design," a term I use loosely, knowing my own limits, is that we don't have a lot of fences to plan against, so the usual rule of putting tall stuff in the back doesn't work when you can see the garden bed from all sides.

And ditto when the bed is round. (Side note, I took the top picture yesterday, during daylight hours, but others at dusk, and you can really see a difference in how the colors appear). The touch of light purple at the lower edge of the center garden is some sort of perennial that I planted late last year -- I just checked, "triple play" phlox. I was pleasantly surprised by them. Meanwhile, the new hydrangea I planted just beyond them is blooming, but I'm wondering if it is a smaller-sized one and whether it might never achieve the large scale of the older ones. Whomp-whomp.

The newest perennial bed by the pond is doing...okay. The split hostas are getting some bleached leaves from a little too much sun exposure. The rudbeckia and the swamp milkweed are doing okay, but 2/3 of the columbine plants have already given up the ghost. In one case, a weed had so perfectly taken the place of one of the plants that Sean had been happily watering it assuming it was the desired organism!

Down at the wild pond patch, things are looking good! I got my first sniff of a just-about-to-open milkweed, ahh.

The wild bergamot are massive, some of these must also be four feet tall. I still can't believe that nothing else I winter sowed here survived. Damn.

After we get back from CA, I'm going to take the plastic off, weedwhack, and re-tarp. This has been tarped for a couple of months and it's still clearly growing under there (a few weeds have even poked right through!).

And last but not least, a few fish browsing in the shallow end. We've seen a few huge schools in the center, so clearly the winter fish kill didn't hurt them that much. Our frog chorus is going strong in the evenings and mornings, but I haven't seen many of the turtles, including the surviving (?) snapper.

Next week we're off to San Diego to visit Ron and Kathy. Our potted herbs we're going to pass over to a neighbor, but I feel weird asking anyone else to come drag a hose around to water perennials, so they're going to have to tough it out!