It’s the 15th of the month, so it’s time for another Bloom Day post. It got blazingly hot here in North Texas, way before it’s supposed to happen, so that garden has been in a bit of a shutdown. We did get about a week of slow, drenching rain that helped, but seriously, the plants are already in survival mode. Not pretty! Still, some of the hardiest are giving up a bit of color…
In the front yard, ever faithful four nerve daisies are blooming a little. Two of the three plants have doubled in size. The third has given up the ghost, after lagging for almost a year.
Yellow Knockout roses are blooming off and on. A well-known local gardener who shall remain nameless recently badmouthed the yellow variety of Knockouts on his Facebook page, saying they looked washed out compared to the red and pink. Bite me! I like my yellow roses.
The yellow gazanias have been struggling this year. They’ve flowered very little, and the blooms have been under sized. I think this is my last year of messing with these.
The butterfly weed is flowering again, after producing a boatload of seed pods. This one has come in tall and leggy. I’m hoping it fills out a bit, and that the seeds I let drop beneath it produce lots of babies. I want to put in a Monarch waystation garden for next spring, and I’ll need a few of these.
The lantana in the front bed is a little disappointing. I think I managed to get one of the bush varieties rather than the trailing kind. Last year at this time, the lantana was sprawling. This year, it’s still small and clumpy. Pretty when close up, but kinda eh when driving by.
I posted a photo of this same Texas sage earlier in the week, when it was covered with flowers. They’ve already started to drop, but they sure were pretty while they lasted.
Purple lantana is going crazy, sprawling all over the place, and covered with blooms. This is an annual variety, and well worth replanting next year.
This is a purple gazania, but because the sun is so brutal, all the color has been bleached from the blooms. They’re positively ghostly. Unlike their yellow cousins, these have been flowering like crazy. Still, probably my last year with them, since the purple lantana gives a better payoff.
My poor little pink Knockouts! One has survived, and started giving tiny blooms again. They other one bit it hard, and is nothing but twigs. I shouldn’t have tried to move them while they were blooming. Ah, well—the one that’s alive will be lovely next year.
The purple coneflower is on the last legs of its first bloom. I deadheaded right after I shot this photo, and found the start of the second round of blooms. This plant is so pretty, and also a candidate for the Monarch waystation. It’s supposed to self-seed, so maybe I’ll have some little coneflowers shortly.
Autumn sage is coming into its second bloom. Right now, I have this purple, raspberry, lipstick, and white in the front yard, all blooming. They’re so pretty, and smell great when I brush up against them.
The Mexican petunias have matured enough to start flowering, and judging by the number of buds, they’ll be in full flower shortly. I’ve already started pulling some of these up, because they’re multiplying like crazy.
In the backyard, this gorgeous lantana is sprawling, and producing blooms in abundance. I’d like to clone this plant, because this is my idea of the perfect one for the front yard. It’s hard to see in the photo, but the flowers are so deeply colored, they look like velvet.
This only happens very briefly, in years where there’s plenty of water: my full fence line of ridiculously tall magenta crape myrtles is covered in flowers. These trees are really starting to lean, so I think I have to invest in a pole trimmer this fall, and cut them back a bit. Even the one that broke under the weight of the winter snow is blooming nicely, which makes me think that trimming them won’t be so traumatic.
Oh, and that’s my new tumble composter, which arrived this week. The neighbors said they saw rats in the honeysuckle along our fence line, so I decided to get the compost pile off the ground, just in case they were using it as a snack station.
Yeah. Eggplant. Dozens and dozens of lovely flowers, on bushes so large and lush, they’re starting to look like tree saplings. Nary an eggplant in sight. They’re just doing this to torture me…
A little friend in the eggplant trees.
Oh, yay. Hundreds of squash bugs in the fall acorn squash vines. Directly after this photo, I was plucking them off, and dropping them into a jar of alcohol. Bastards! I scraped off dozens of eggs, too, and tonight, I have a board laying out for them to sleep under, so I can kill more in the morning. Tomorrow, I go in search of diatomaceous earth. I am particularly protective of these vines right now, because the first two tiny acorn squash have appeared. I am determined that they will not meet the miserable insect death that killed off the spring squashes before I got a decent harvest from them.
That’s it for this month.
This post was written for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. On the 15th of every month, gardeners from around the world take a moment to photograph whatever is blooming, and share. If you’re a gardener, join in!
