THE FLOWERS ARE AMAZING

 The flowers have been beautiful this year in spite of everything.  First we had too much wind and rain in June, and just as we were whining about the rain, the weather became hot and dry and it has stayed hot and dry for several weeks.  We have had to water by hand and it has taken a lot of our time.
I have since promised never to complain about the rain again.  These pink flowers looked just like weeds when they first came up. 

We had a difficult time deciding which plants were weeds and which were flowers. It is quite possible that we pulled some flowers, thinking they were weeds, and there have been some plants that we carefully tended only to find out they weeds. 

There are a lot of perennials in our gardens and it is fun to see what is coming up. 

 It took about three weeks to get all of the annuals planted.  In this picture (right to left) are white and purple alyssums, pink impatience (they like shade so we should have chosen something else) purple salvia, dusty millers and blue ageratums.  It is fun to watch them grow.  We have had to battle bugs, groundhogs, and deer, but the worst has been Japanese Beetles.

 We have a dozen or more colors of lilies.  The deer came into our mailbox garden and ate the tops of 6-8 lilies.  We put pieces of Irish Spring Soap in all of the hostas to keep the deer out, but we had no idea they would eat the lilies.  We have since put soap around every garden.  The next challenge was groundhogs and/or moles who dug under the lilies and ate the bulbs, leaving the lilies lying on the ground.  They still had some roots on them (above the missing bulb) so we replanted them and they bloomed.  If you look closely behind me in the next picture you will see dozens of white lilies blooming, in spite of being re-planted bare root. We purchased two kinds of "noise makers" that vibrate and chase the moles away.

It is fun, but a lot of work keeping all the flowers alive, well, and happy. We have had to hand water  for several weeks and the grass is very dry (burning up).  The sprinkling system has been down and we have been waiting for a special part to fix the main line.  Mike got it fixed on Friday and it came on last night, for the first time this year.  It is great that he can do so many different things.  He still has to do more work on the system, but we are delighted to have it working now.

The peonies were beautiful.  This picture was taken in June.  We had white ones and at least 6 different shades of red and pink.  The varigated pink ones above were some of my favorite.

The white lilies on the right (above) are some of the ones that had their bulbs eaten.  The fact that they still bloomed seemed quite miraculous to us. 

The salmon colored poppies were beautiful this year too.  They are gone now, but they lasted for a very long time.

While I have been tending flowers, Mike has been cutting down trees, clearing brush, maintaining trails, and reworking the sprinkler system.  He still has a lot of work to do on the sprinkler system, but we are delighted he has got it working.   Hope you enjoyed the flowers.  Mike took lots of beautiful pictures.   Love to everyone!