We had a frost on Tuesday night. I cut a bunch of dahlias to enjoy inside, and made my peace with things. And while I did have to scrape my car to go to work in the morning, temps must have hovered around 32 degrees, because everything’s still alive. That includes the basil (middle picture

Here’s the last of the dahlias that hadn’t bloomed since my last post. They prove an interesting point. My least favorite color is orange, but I’m absolutely a sucker for a good orange flower. Look at the shading on both of these! Hurricane is the one I grew from seed several years ago, and he’s

It occurred to me that I haven’t done a dahlia post yet. We’ve reached their preferred daylight length, so almost all of them have bloomed at this point. The pictures above are in bloom order – the first two got things started early in July. Technically, the Rhubarb and Custard tuber I bought this year

I find myself with an interesting dilemma. I am not drowning in zucchini. Turns out the woodchuck loves the leaves. This is the very first flower it’s managed so far this summer (male of course). It also loves the greens of all kinds, of course, so those are pretty much doa this year. (At least

Planting is done. We found a clematis we liked for the front bed, so that’s placed in a brand new hole with plenty of extra compost. The back bed is also done. And the woodchuck ate my lettuce today. Hasn’t noticed the chard yet, which is ringed by more distracting plants then the lettuce was,

So that was an interesting May. I aim to plant around Memorial Day, which can be a bit of a crap shoot. This year was the earliest that Memorial Day can possibly be, and we had the heat on that weekend. And then had it on the next weekend as well – cold, rainy weekends

We are in peak violet and wild strawberry cover season in the back yard – it makes me happy every time I look out the back windows. The rest of my dahlias came in on Thursday, so I had them all planted by Friday. And one of the early batch has sprouted! I am glad

I’m starting my dahlias inside this year. It’s just been so cold I don’t trust having them in the greenhouse yet. I’ll just have to be very careful getting them out of these pots this time, so I don’t repeat my mistakes from the last time I did this. These are six of the seven

Here’s the after photos since the landscaping crew came through and got rid of so many shrubs. I went through and cleaned up a lot of leaves this weekend, and we got the rain barrels out. We’re definitely going to be on sprout patrol in most of these spots – there are several invasives scattered

Seedlings have been planted up. I’m having kind of a meh year with seed starting. I tried to start delphinium, and failed. I suspect I should have treated them like I did the columbine seed and stratified them first. So I’ll try that next year. It was brand new seed, so I don’t think that