Various yard things have been happening that are probably only interesting to me. Skip this one if you’re sensitive to information about plants.
So the Asian/Chinese Dogwood (I can find sources saying either) bloomed. It has been blooming for several weeks, and the flowers are just starting to look ratty. It looks pretty good after the hacking it took last year to remove branches with bacterial wilt:
Artsy picture of flowers:
All my flowers and hostas are looking really good. Here’s the side bed looking toward the street from the back:
The spirea in the front are in bloom…it’s particular hard to tell that 1) I hacked the shit out of these in the late fall, to where they were only MAYBE 6 inches tall, and 2) APHID INFESTATION!
The hydrangea I planted in front of the hosecart is blooming:
Yesterday, I went to Anderson’s to buy more foxglove, because I really like them and want to establish a little stand of them (recall that foxglove is usually a biennial, so you need to have quite a few to make sure it keeps proliferating), and I stopped to see Aunt Jeri on my way back. She wasn’t at her house, so I found her at Scott Michael’s house. She offered me free hostas from Scott Michael’s side yard:
(Free hostas meant I had to extend the side bed even further toward the street and buy mulch and more dirt to finish it off…good thing it wasn’t as hot yesterday as it was earlier today.)
The flowers by the patio are crazy. The hostas are way too big, but I’m not doing anything to them until the fall when I can split them and it won’t matter what they look like. My climatis is blooming:
Another view:
The moonbeam coreopsis looks the best it ever has:
The ferns are looking particular good…probably the same moisture that lead to all the fungus among us is doing good things for them:
The grass even looks good. I think up until now it hasn’t been hot and dry enough to bake the areas that always get baked.
Other than the yard, not much is new. I tried to give blood this morning at some creepy methodist church like 4 minutes from here, and I was denied because my iron was too low. I went immediately to buy iron supplements and am already remembering that my stomach isn’t fond of iron supplements.
OH! I joined a CSA this year and have been up to my eyeballs in fancy and not-so-fancy greens and kohlrabi and turnips and other fun things. I was all idealistic about figuring out awesome recipes for all my oddball vegetables, but I’ve used almost all of it in salads. Everything is flavorful and delicious…it’s a lot for one person to eat in a week. Luckily my dad ate a decent sized salad the other day to help power through this week’s stuff. Monday is pick up day, but I don’t have tooooo much left.