Lots of activity in the front cottage garden and very hard to capture it all as an “ensemble”. I do keep trying though. These photos are 1-2 weeks old (I’m getting lazier with every degree the temperature rises). I’ve got to get out there early tomorrow morning and get some shots with the day lilies in bloom. Problem is by 6 a.m. the light is almost too harsh, which explains why you aren’t viewing more current photos. Today I rose at 7 and it could have just as well been noon.

This garden may look like a mess to some people, but something’s always blooming and it sure is low maintenance. While weeds are taking over some of the newer more controlled beds at the moment, few weeds can grow in the cottage garden since every square inch of ground is occupied and any bare ground that may exist is shaded by a huge canopy of leaves.

We’ve been eating better these days. The garden has been helping. And while we have pulled the occasional items here and there, this was the first full meal of a wide variety of fresh veggies. The chiogga beet (white and red stripes behind the cucumber) is a very sweet variety and it doesn’t bleed all over the plate when stabbed with a fork – which, as we all know, is one of the worst things about beets. The garden is about ready to explode with produce. It’s exciting, but in some ways I wish it would just stay at about this pace.

I sure do like blueberries. Our bushes are still very small, yet some are heavy with little fruits. These shrubs grow painfully slow, and probably need more attention than they receive. Lately, I’ve been saving coffee grounds and yesterday I added a top dressing of filters and all to several of our shrubs. The coffee grounds are supposed to add acidity to the soil, and blueberries apparently like acidic soil. Iowa soil is typically not very acidic. One of these days I should invest in a little soil test.

Blueberries

Happy Independence Day everyone!

(Did you notice my red-white-blue postings today? Yay!!!! Sing it with me everyone… Ohhh, say, can you see…)

Click any of the images in this post for a larger view.

Daisy with expired allium bloom

Double Hollyhock

Single Hollyhock

White Cone Flower (echinacea)

These little cherries are a great garden snack. They aren’t exactly sweet, but they don’t induce a pucker either. The sweeter cherry trees we planted didn’t make it – probably a zone issue, but hitting a young tree with a skid loader is also not good for it. So far, this sour variety has been just as enjoyable, if not more so than its sweeter cousin. We might need another one as a backup.

sweet and sour cherries

I did a quick search on our blog for beets and it came up with only one reference. It was a minor reference with no images or description or story telling. Surely beets deserve more than this! They are sweet, disease resistant, healthy, and while I’ve never much liked them, from time to time they are pretty damn good.

beet greens

I suspect it is because of my aversion to beets that they receive less blog time than other vegetables. Grandpa always grew beets. I always had to pull weeds from the rows of beets. Sometimes I accidentally pulled out beets along with weeds. Most of the time, this was not done on purpose. Turns out, beets like and need thinning – I was likely doing them good.

cylindra beet

This is my fourth summer living in the country and I have developed a deep appreciation for certain wild flora that city dwellers (myself included before I moved to the country) often aren’t aware of. One shrub you’ll see a lot of on gravel roads is Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis). Just up the road is a particularly gorgeous example with a nice habit. So graceful, flowy and just simply comfortable in the country.

These lovely frothy fragrant blooms will become deep purple berries which can be used for wines and jams. I haven’t tried this myself yet but hope to one of these summers when I either stop planting and weeding or just make the time. I would love to have a field of nothing but Elderberry.

Peaches has started “acting out” again early in the morning. He comes in our bedroom and cries between 4 and 5 AM and today he wanted to play- which entails getting under the covers and rolling around while clawing at me and play biting. So today I’m up before my usual 6-7ish.

And now another naughty thing Peaches has done recently. I made a tiny bed to plant annual seed in- a piece of cardboard, a ring of stones, leaves and dirt. I went to all this trouble because this area is pure compacted gravel. I suppose I could have just sprinkled the seeds and seen what happened, as many seeds seem to like these conditions, but it seemed iffy. In the end the seeds never did get planted as Peaches seems to think this bed is his outdoor litter box. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked by and seen him in the bed assuming the position. And so now I’m left with the task of dismantling it.

5 minutes later: Just after I wrote the above, Peaches decided to redeem himself via an extra long cuddle session.

Anne’s not going to much like this post. Anne had found a rather large snake skin in the compost bed several weeks ago. Ever since then, the bed has been called the “snake bed.” And just yesterday I suggested we stop calling it the snake bed so that Anne wouldn’t continue to avoid it. Then, later in the day, I saw this guy making his way back to the snake bed.

Click the image for a large view

What’s the Father’s Day relevance? My father has always liked snakes – we had boa constrictors as pets. They are really nice pets, not too needy, really quiet, don’t shed often and when they do it doesn’t cling to clothing and furniture.

Click the image for larger view

This is a fox snake… at least I am 95% certain it is a fox snake. We had been calling this a bull snake, but after more research (aka google image searching), I feel relatively certain this is indeed more foxy than bull. It’s about 3.5 – 4 feet long and vibrates his tail when posing for photographs.

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY DAD!!!

This is our wild, “naturalistic” garden- a tangled mess of perennials and self-seeding annuals. In early spring there are tulips, daffodils, bearded irises and creeping phlox  in this planting, but at this phase in the season the plants are taller, fuller and more exuberant. The height is perfect for hiding the unsightly dying bulb foliage. Though I constantly view this planting with a critical eye and make small steps each year to incorporate more fall, winter and spring interest, I have to admit that I have achieved exactly the garden I set out to create when we moved here several years ago. Sited in front of our farmhouse, I felt it was much more appropriate to the setting than the foundation planting we left behind in Mt. Vernon. Plus a path takes you through the middle of the tangle, i.e. you can get inside it and view it from more angles than foundation plantings allow. It was inspired by a photo I saw in one of Noël Kingsbury’s books. If I could spend a day with any famous person in the world, I would choose Noël (NOT Josh Groban). Noël and I would have so much to talk about.