Blooming Sansevieria

Our Sansevieria horwoodii finally bloomed! It shot up one long stalk with several flower buds. It's the first time the plant has ever produced flowers.

Peacock Orchid

Here is a picture of our first peacock orchid in bloom. It looks like there will be few blooms for these plants this year. It's their first year.

Our orange gladiolus bloomed this week. It was so hot that it only produced one bloom. I've never seen a gladiolus like this one: it's a double, ruffled bloom. It's a beautiful color. It has orange on the outside and then fades to a dark, peach on the inside.

As for everything else, we are trying to not let it get crispy. We have no plants in full sun because we have so many trees in our yard. Yet even the part sun plants are trying to move to the shade. At least that's what I think they're doing. Poor plants.

By the way, to comment on the end of the previous post. The bunnies are eating the liatris. Matt feels very conflicted. He wagged his finger at the culprit and told him not to do it again. This should work since Matt is very good with rabbits. He speaks au lapin.

Back At It

Whew! What a year! My poor garden blog is being ignored more than the garden. I just wanted to get on real quick and post some pictures from the garden. Our gladiolus is blooming. We planted it late and I wasn't expecting blooms this year. It has shot up five plants and two are blooming. The picture is of the pink one. The orange one is still budding. It will be interesting to see what that ends up looking like. Our hydrangeas are blooming profusely despite the heat. However, their blooms sag because of the heat, so Matt's out there every day watering them. Of course they are on the complete other side of the yard from the hose. Finally, we have the liatris. It's one of our "Seussian" looking plants. Something has been coming and breaking them off near the base before they bloom out. Poor plants.

Wow. So it's been over a month now. Obviously, Matt and I have been busy in the yard. However, this week we've done a lot of nothing. I worked a lot, which is also my story for the whole month of July. It's also very hot here. The radio said it was the hottest summer on record here. Blah. We installed soaker hoses in the garden beds (by "we" I mean Matt.) We are in the process of getting the trees taken out. I still sometimes feel a twinge of bad treehugger coming out of me from time to time. I remind myself that it's for the remaining trees' health. I think our final number will be eleven fully mature trees in our yard. The tree service has done everything except grind the stumps out, which they're doing tomorrow. No pictures this time. I don't have time to upload them. The blog is just a side track right now. I actually got on to see pictures of our adorable nephew, Jason. The cutest baby ever! I thought I knew where the camera was, but now that I think about it... I have no idea. Not too much in the way of visual appearance has happened to the yard. I did finally weed-eat the weeds in the back left of the back yard to the height of the grass. It looks a lot better now. I've been working on breaking down the old carriage house foundation. Since that's probably the sunniest part of the backyard, I want to get working on that ASAP. However, there is a lot of old, pebbly concrete back there. We will post pictures as soon as we can of the new look of our yard sans overgrown trees. Our next tree project: removing the dead wood out of the trees. And there's a lot of it!

And We're Back to Blogging

Busy, busy, busy. But now things are settling down a bit. It's also getting hot in St. Louis. The high 90's for the next couple days and it's humid. Blah. Anyway, we've finally gotten back to the yard again. We've had birthdays, weddings, baby showers, and a graduation all in the past couple weeks. Let's see what the pictures say about the yard. Oh, Memorial Day weekend, we rented a wood chipper. Those things are big. It definitely struck me with a sense of my own mortality. Feed a six-inch log into the chipper and watch it get crushed in a matter of a few seconds. It was like the nightmares of Texas Chainsaw Massacre all over again. I have pictures of the chipper but I think they're in my May picture folder. I'll have to post them later because after this post I'm going to bed. These pictures are the result of us chipping our cedar tree. It was growing sideways. If you don't know, cedar mulch is expensive so it was worth it for us to chip the tree up. I really thought that a whole tree would end up in a bigger pile than this. Anyway, we also got a wheelbarrow (finally!) I've been wanting and needing a wheelbarrow for quite a few months. Makes hauling dirt and compost from one garden bed to another a lot easier. I love our wheelbarrow. And we got it for $30 because it had a couple of scratches in it. It's not like I wasn't going to scratch it up anyway hauling cedar logs around. Since we have a whole bunch of cedar mulch now, I've been mulching everything. I mulched the front bed of boxwoods and impatiens and man do they look awesome now. Well I better sign off for now because Foo is awkwardly making a bed out of my lap.

Some Shady Characters

Now we're all up-to-date. The boxwood and impatiens in the front bed were planted throughout the week last week. The caladium (big, leafy plants) I planted next to the air conditioner yesterday and today. The picture of the weeds with a bare patch is what I accomplished after about 45 minutes of sitting in one spot of weeds and pulling them up. I have about 20 times more weeds to pull. Ugh. The bare patch of dirt is also where all the gross gray and pink worms were saying hello to me. So gross!