A Hot Finish for the Week...

 We have been having heavy humidity and the nights are filled with cloud cover keeping from finding the moon.

 I planted some spare seed from the past in one of my planters. I have another color of morning glories, finally after all the time it has been planted. It seems to be a little beat up but it has great color. 

I picked them as they started to turn. The excess rain is causing splits in one of my varieties. This variety is one that is going to go ripe all within a few weeks. In some ways they have been slow in their ripening. I should have paid closer attention to the varieties that I bought but I do know I didn't want any of the larger varieties. I think the markers are out there underneath the grass mulch. 

A new garden of hosta is developing for me in a good way. I planted the ledge next to my new backyard gate. I just filled it in as it made sense to put them there rather trying to get grass to grow there. I leave my hoe out there for my neighbor lady to use when she visits her home while it it is still up for sale. Her weeds grow in her raised beds where they grew vegetables. I offered  to do the job but she insists that she wants to do it herself. 

My dianthus were slow in getting established in my front flower garden bed. I was surprised to see them blooming  so well this past week. 

Heat and humidity continues in our area. I should say high heat but I think most people know we call it heat. Our trip from the car to the church was amazing and it was typical Iowa weather. The weather people say we are going to cool down a bit but it doesn't seem like it has. I can the yards are now being affected

Thanks for stopping by today. 

Saturday Sun All Day

 It is a wonderful color. I can only see one of these out there of this color. The zinnias are getting to be taller even though they are not all the same height. 

The phlox are starting to look pretty weathered. It is the middle of August so I guess it should be expected. The rains and the winds are hard on them but they do just start dropping the small individual flowers on the ground making it look like pink snow. 

My roses are in their second blooming cycle right now. It was slow coming but it shows here how the four are all in different development stages. 

The bush at the bottom of the stairs had a lot of deadwood this spring so it didn't look like it was going to have many blooms. It has revived even though the major form or shape has shifted in appearance because of the loss of stems on the north side of it.  With the new fence installed they may not freeze out so badly. .

 I spent time cleaning up some of my mess from the weed trimming that I did yesterday. I also started the cutting away of my peonies today. I do a couple of bushes at a time each day as they have to be stuffed into paper bags for recycle. The peonies are starting to get a gray mold or rust on them so it is time to remove them. They are sure healthy otherwise with all our great rainfall this year. I have three more to remove in the back yard and then I need to work on the row of peonies in the front yard. I am also fighting back a vine that the former owner had planted. I think I would like to completely eliminate from the front flower beds as it just keeps spreading even on the rock garden surfaces. 

We did get up to 92 degrees F. this afternoon. It is great for the swimming pool owners to get in the water and stay there all afternoon. My walk to the mailbox is the most and only exposure that I have to do this afternoon. Thanks for stopping by today.

Wait for It!

 As I took the shot I could hear the calls of the flying Canadian geese. I couldn't see where the were but when you look at the left side of the shot you can see two birds.

I waited for it and there they were. I had to shoot quickly because it is so easy to miss them with you phone camera. I am shooting blind. 

I waited for it and there they were in the V formation flying over the house. I don't know how many are honking but they do take turns as there is continual honking. 

Down on the ground I went on to help with breakfast, making coffee.  I got frustrated and put my camera down for a while as the hummingbirds just would flit in and out and I just wasn't getting good light or good shots. Then it happened as theis one sat on the feeder and gazed up to see if anyone was flying her way. 

The woman of the house next door frowns when she talks about what her husband did to a perfectly established set of iris. He thought they look too crowded but they were not. They ended up not having blooms. He thinned and removed so much that the last bits of iris had no base for blooming. I looked over while mowing this morning and I saw this. The woman must have bought a reblooming iris and here it is blooming in August. I had to shoot the photo through the narrow slot of the fence. I see next to this plan is the struggling older iris trying to regroup. I bet it will bloom next season right along to this new one.

 

I got out my weed trimmer this morning and did some serious work. I finally got to the job and I did the best I could until it got to be too hot out there. I  could return in another week and maybe touch it up with anything that is left. The weeds had taken over in a lot of my gardens. 

It is Friday and I am ready for a quiet evening. Thanks for stopping by today.

Thursday's the Day

 I still don't have a weather vane for my finial. I will work on that. I have a base made to raise its height but I will wait until fall to install it after the flowers have been frozen off and they won't get damage. 

A blurry shot of the little guy getting bigger in size. It is the smallest of my rabbits. The other small one is the size of an adult rabbit now. My  telephone camera cant get good pictures of small things that are far away.

I have a good collection of shots of the yellow rose. Since I didn't get my blog done yesterday I have a few photos to share for a few days. I mowed my front yard yesterday and I did stop before I was done as it got to hot. I will finish the backyard today and we woke up to 67 degrees F.  I can mow with cooler weather and be done before it gets hot this afternoon. The grass is the best it has been in years with the frequent rains. Usually in August things start to die out and get brown. 

We hit a movie yesterday and ate out for supper. It was good to get out of the house. We live a couple of miles from the movie theater and it is in a major complex of stores. We explored one of the cafes that had a "Breakfast from Tiffany's" graphic on it. The woman is a large illustration of the woman from that movie and she is holding a stack of twenty pancakes. We didn't go there but we drove around to see where the front door was. The side with the sign was not the entrance and as we drove around it there was a parking ramp there on the side. So we kept driving around just to see where they were hiding the front door. We found it. We will have to hit the place some morning for breakfast. 

Happy Thursday.

Tuesday's Things....

 It was beautiful. I took a shot of it on Monday and it rained that night. The next morning every single petal was on the ground. I guess it was spent and ready to shed.

The knock out roses are not doing great even with all of the rain. This single petal variety has just a few blooms on them. 

 

My newest host is looking better after I tore out all of the invade creeping phlox. It struggled the entire last season and this season it is coming to life.I can see that I need to pull some grasses around it but that is not a problem compared to that invading phlox.

The young mourning dove just keep coming to the feeders. There must have  been a couple of nests of thm as there are so many. 

These two are just hanging around  and seem to be like explorers. I am at the point that I want to put less seed out there as there are just too many birds out there. Sparrows just flock in large numbers as they two have lots of fledglings. 

I planted many glads but this seems to be the only one that I will have this year. I mowed my neighbor's yard this morning trying to keep it looking good in case there are any people here to look at her house. I may hit it a second time Saturday just in the front to perk it up for a Sunday showing. We are waiting for a repairman today. It may be late today or maybe could even be tomorrow sometime. They were not a company that had fixed appointment times. It is not a great way to do business and yet I am so glad they can come to repair rather than us buying a new one. The sun is hot today and yet we aren't going to get so extremely hot. No rain today is a good thing. Thanks for stopping by today. 

I see that the glad photo is a repeat showing. It does get to be complicated keep track of things.

First of the Week.....

 A humid start of the day and then we were in full sunshine. The humidity is the major hurdle as it is very heavy even when the temps are not so high. It is raining right now at 77 degrees F.

 

I was out this morning trimming back bad growth and excess growth on my variegated dogwood shrub. I really like the dogwood but I did let it get so big that people had to walk around it to come up our front sidewalk to the door. 

I tried to plant some mammoth sunflowers among the volunteer ones and they did not grow. I did apparently drop a seed accidentally and it landed on the very corner of my raised bed.  I didn't know what kind it was when it first sprouted but I let it grow. It is going to be a big sunflower. 

 

Among the volunteer sunflowers the morning glories are taking off. They are starting to vine to the top of them.

With all the humidity and rainstorms in the north we got some good cloud formations last evening. I am sure a weatherman would know the name for these clouds. 

The hummer looks a little weathered from all the moisture yesterday. They have learned how to sit on that perch of the feeder.I have both feeders filled and the do move back and forth and of course they fight over them. The do not like the wasps and bees feeding at them but they don't get aggressive towards them. They just move on until they are gone. Thanks for stopping in today.

Checking In to Post...

 We continue to get heavy rains. The last one was with lots of wind and it gave us over an inch of rain. You can see the wind was from the east as the water is still clinging to the window glass.

I read that the mourning dove can hatch and fledge three or four nest fulls in one season. Can you see why we can identify the new young ones. The adult is on the right. I looked up the word fledge and it means that when a bird fills out enough feathers to be able to fly.

They first act like explorers wonder what is going on out there in this world.  The morning dove prefers a flat area to eat from. They love the spillover of seed on the deck. 

My black swallowtail returned the next day but had damaged wings on the top of its one side  I hurried out to take photos of it this time with my good camera and it stayed long enough for me to get one shot. Then it flew off to another neighbor's backyard. 

It was a hot day again today. We had a thunderstorm in the early morning with strong winds. The day cleared up and it is a beautiful summer day. More storms are predicted. Thanks for stopping by today.