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as the heat climbs

This past week, I’ve been trying, in little bits and pieces, to get the garden ready for summer. Finish mulching, finish planting. I still have some potted annuals and even a few perennials lying about ready to be transplanted that I’m watering sometimes two times a day to keep them from completely drying out.

This is the time of year when I start wondering why I like plants in containers at all! I really adore beautiful ceramic containers and last year added some metal feeding troughs and painted a few cheap wood and ceramic containers I got at home depot. The containers themselves add color and architecture to my otherwise wild garden. In the summer, though, it’s all I can do to keep them watered and presents problems when we take some of our frequent, extended trips out of town (presumably to someplace cooler!). Read more

hail storms and heat

The summer started out with a bang, literally. Bangs and bangs of hail. We had 3 separate hail storms within three weeks of each other, each one with progressively larger hail. It was the third storm that did me in. Or my garden, I should say. I think it was a near tornado. Two weeks ago, we were out late at night looking at a house our friends are thinking of buying, and suddenly the sky was filled with heat lightning and a strange yellowish light that seasoned weather veterans know as tornado skies. Read more