Early J une

I had major battery issues with my camera, so you get two weeks of gardeny goodness for one in this entry.

I laid three more courses of bricks--working until I ran out of the bricks I needed and the black flies drove me inside. I need to go over to the bone yard to get more of the bricks. I was able to lay out where I think the walkway should finish, though, so I can get just enough bricks this coming weekend to finish the project:



My strawberries aren't really doing much of anything. But with some rain and then some sun and warmth, my tomatoes are suddenly shooting up three and four inches overnight. I've heard farmers say that if you listen hard enough you can hear the corn growing. I think it must be true of my tomatoes, too.



My first fruit, coming on the vine!!




My flowerbed is finally taking off, helped with a few new plantings of perennials I got from a new local garden store.

Last week:



This week, it still looks like a bunch of green bushy things, but I can't believe how much fuller it's gotten. New things are in the dead center (balloon flowers) and the right (delphinium)



My butterfly bushes aren't doing much of anything yet, but my clematis are really climbing on the split rail fence. The bud hadn't opened over the weekend, but today when I got home, I was rewarded with this:





The delphinium that convinced me to buy some is really nifty. It's mostly a pale blue, but the centers of each petals have a sort of bleed-through pinkish effect. It's not a pink flower, and not a blue flower, and not a purple flower, and it doesn't reproduce well in photos, but it's sure nifty. It was blooming a little bit when I bought it. After a few days of good sun, rain, and a bigger space in which to stretch out its roots, it's in full bloom now:






The iris bloomed over the weekend, and have mostly peaked and started to wilt now. The hummingbird buzzed me while I was standing there taking photos. He's getting much less shy now, and even let me get within a foot or two of the feeder to take some photos of him.








I found some neat petunias to supplement the bowl on top of my stump. They're red with little spots along the edges that are white. Going with my red-and-white theme in the stump bed. The perennials in the stump bed are definitely getting bigger and stronger, but most aren't anywhere near blooming. One of the crimson scabiosa had a nice bud on it over the weekend, but I could tell that it wasn't going to be really RED when it opened. Today, sure enough, it's hot pink. Hopefully it darkens next year once it's established.







And finally, I got tired of looking at the rose corpses in my rose bed. It was driving me crazy to know that I'd transplanted three dead hunks of wood. None of the two suppliers guarantee that their roses will winter over up here, so I couldn't get free replacements. But wait! My favorite local nursery had roses on sale the other day. And they had lots to choose from! Including my beloved blaze, the *snicker* golden showers that I got by accident last year, and my long-sought-after Joseph's Coat. So I splurged on those and planted them. I need to tie them up to the trellis yet, but I wanted to give them a day or two to settle in before giving them any more trauma.