Tuesday's Things............

The photo of the creeping bluebells took second place as the camera focused only on the cicada.  I thought we were about done with the ground creepers but I still see more are emerging from the ground and crawling up the trees to buzz continually.  They come in the house on the dogs backs and also mine. With the storm that we had last night I would hope that some of them got thrust to the ground with our hurricane force winds.

I went out last night to walk Barney at 10:00.  It was over 80 degrees F. when we left.  When we arrived to our turning around area to walk back down the side of the street, a huge wind came up instantly.  As we walked back the temperatures dropped to 67 degrees in just a few minutes.  With the wind was blowing the temp in, it made me cold instantly.  I knew then that we were going to have a fun night. 

It started storming by midnight and the wind blew the rain sideways.  I see we lost a few limbs.  It thundered most all of the night and early morning it was still at it.  It was not a good night to sleep.  Fortunately Barney hides in the bathroom downstairs so he wasn't bothered.  Button has lost his hearing sadly but on the good side he slept through the whole storm.  We had a storm weather radio going off about every twenty minutes to warn us and then report that we were getting hit with severe weather. The local weather guy came back in to the studio on tv  and had to cover it as there were tornadoes north of us.  We will be having the same kind of storms again tonight.

As I was walking Barney last night I was thinking that it was going to be another hot summer and I would have to water everything to keep things alive.  Instead we received a lot of rain and I don't have to water today.  I was watering the zinnias to keep them going and now they will really start to shoot up with a real watering. This is my red zinnia flower patch and they did germinate well.  I supplemented some more seeds in some blank spots but they will be a very good looking flower patch.

 My other area that I planted zinnias also had some blank spots that needed new seed put into the rows but they too are growing quickly. It helped to water them every other day to get them rooted in to the soil.

I do have a tomato blooming but it figures, because I bought one larger plant at the store and put it in a few days ago.  It liked being in a real garden and not at the store as two days later it started to bloom.  My tomato plants that were started inside are doing well.  I didn't have a lot of success with them as only half of them actually are growing quickly, but that will be enough tomatoes for two people.  The other half seem to be having trouble rooting in the soil and may give me late tomatoes.

 I took out the rest of the 29 year old spreading juniper.  It really did look great but it was getting way out of bounds because of it size.  This is an ugly before shot and the whole project has inspired me to get rid of the rest of this and start a new garden area to replace it.

I have been cutting back the shrub in sessions and yesterday during the heat I decided to get rid of it as much as possible.  I have a Philippine friend that likes to use my chain saw so I will give him the opportunity to use my saw. 

When I designed our porch steps I created a set of stairs that also go off in this direction.  We never used them as the juniper would hit us in the face if we tried.  Once I was at the top of the porch seeing what the trimmed back area looked like, I could visualize a path and a flower garden going down through there and heading around the house.  You can see I still have a lot of cleaning up to do in the area.  I have a couple of dutch iris that will be glad to be moved into the sunlight.  This is a project that was just created yesterday and I  will take all summer to move hostas and other things into the area to develop the area.  I will share pictures when there are any big changes.

The variegated iris did not bloom this year but it was the weather's fault.  I do think they look a little crowded now but they weren't during the time of their blooming season.  I can probably thin out the hosta some and maybe move a start of the iris to the new planting area.
I have Asiatic lilies to bloom here and phlox also doing well this year. Our dry season last summer shut most of them down too early or they didn't bloom at all. I do have a full rain barrel from last nights rain so I can start watering them when we hit a dry spell.

This is the very last peony shot for the year.  I am sure last night's rain will have shredded it in the night.  It is a little blurry as I was shooting it during a blustery day in the afternoon.

I have indoor work to do today and I will stay out of the heat.  I was out in it too long yesterday and I am really weary today. I need to get started on the creation of the Senior composite, formatting and editing over 50 photos with names and corrected sizes of photos.  In the old days we actually just pasted the real senior picture onto the backing but now we have only a digital copy.  I have to place the photo into the template and then type the person's name below, with correct spelling.  That simplified what I really have to do as the digital copies are all different sizes and the photos need to be cropped and sometime brought into focus.  We still lack two photos that we may have to dig out from a year old yearbook.  They don't turn in their senior shot then we are justified to use their junior photo.

We had a good anniversary day yesterday.  We ended up running in to eat at a place, not the one planned, so we could eat early and be home with the dogs before the storm.  We will go to our chosen place next Monday when the weather is better and we don't have to rush home. My wife posted one of our  young wedding shots on facebook yesterday and most people were surprised we had been married 30 years.  They remembered it but really weren't around to see us grow older gracefully.  We were just a couple of kids still at the age of 34 compared to our ages today. As my wife mentioned that it is our anniversary of 30 years and one day today, so we could celebrate the whole month for our anniversary.  I am good with that.  Thanks everyone for stopping by to visit the blog today.