Waterlilies and the garden update

Last Saturday I got out in the solo canoe and trimmed out the willow trees that had fell into the pond to clean it up some. Sadly it was the last time we saw the pair of Mallard ducks in the pond. But the next day exactly a week ago, the waterlilies came out, only 3 but a start. Below is 2 of the 3.

I planted the waterlilies 6 or 7 years ago, they now cover 3/4 of the 70- 80 foot diameter pond. In a few years I'll likely have to do a major thinning to keep them under control. We also have several nice clusters of Pickerelweed in the pond.

Today a portion of thew waterlilies in the pond.

This iris is either an Louisiana Iris or a Siberian Iris, the blades seem too thin to be a Louisiana, could it have crossed with the Siberian nearby?

This is an Louisiana Iris for sure and only a few feet for the other iris.

One of my seedling tomatoes in the garden, we have had a terrible year for growing seedlings.

This was last Sunday nights dinner Swiss Chard from the garden finally. The next morning Meg found a pile of chard leaves on the deck that I must have dropped.


Beets and carrots growing in the garden today.

You know I'm legally colored blind, only greens and reds. Meg pointed out to me that this spiderwort was a bit pink and not blue. I stopped at a garden club plant sale yesterday, the garden they had the sale in was full of all kinds of spiderworts and none for sale. I did get 6 plants including a cultivated goldenrod, exciting.

Lemon Cucumber for this morning in our garden. we have an old fashioned tripod set up over it to grow on.

The upper half of the clematis growing along our walkway I featured last week on my blog entry.

The latest project here, Meg wanted dog protection for her batchler buttons. I made the lattice from scraps left over from a customers recent project. Each panel is removable too.

Peas and new lattice

Super Sugar Snap Peas our first harvest this year. There was a bit more but I ate a few right off the vine. Meg is in CA and is missing her own pea harvest, maybe she'll be back before I eat them all... There is plenty more peas out there to fatten up and we've been getting rain since last night.


Here is the custom lattice I'm making for the deck and screened porch. The holes are 5 x 5 inches, I might add a 1 inch wide lattice strip vertically down the middle of the existing 5 x 5 holes to make it more of a screen. If I did that the openings would be 2 x 5 inches. What do you think would be best? I have a lot of 1 x 6 scraps that I can make the 1 inch lattice strips out of too.


Below is the corner of the screened porch and once the snow peas are done we'll be planting heavenly blue morning glories and moonflower vines in that corner.



The flowers below are Lupine diffusus that we found in the Sandhills Gamelands last weekend. This plant is biannual and seems to move about in the gamelands from year to year. Some places where you find a lot of it might have next to nothing in a few years. The gamelands management in the past few years has been cutting out huge numbers of pines and scrub oaks making quail habitat all over the gamelands. It hurts to see such a beautiful native habitat being destroyed to bring in hunters from all over to hunt Bob White Quail, we heard one quail all day on Sunday.


Lupne diffusus is one of the Frosted Elfin butterflies host plants. We searched about an acre of flowers and as expected did not find any elfins. We did however see a rare Confused Cloudywing and several Northern Cloudywings and Southern Cloudywings. Finding all three of our cloudyings together in one spot does not happen very often and these were my first cloudywings of the season too.


Sadly in a week or so these blooms will be gone until next year.