After 4 Days of Rain

June 12, 2010
(OOPS! Forgot to publish this post on the weekend..... :)

We finally got some sunshine today and after 4 straight days, the rain stopped. We got about 3 iches of rain this week added to the 3 inches we got last week. More than enough to last us for quite some time, thank you Mother Nature! (Hint, hint!)

It was great to get outside and check out the progress of the flowers in my beds.  I was nice to see the lilies had grown since I had checked them last and good to note that nothing had been eaten. The Plantskydd seems to be doing its job. I noticed a couple calendulas had 2 leaves bitten off, but they were lying next to the plant. "Someone" must have thought they looked tasty only to change their mind once they had it in their mouth! I know last year the calendula were always getting decimated by the rabbits and the deer.  This year, judging by the location, I think the culprit might be our bold little next door neighbor, the marmot twins!

I set to work and cleaned up the last of my flower beds (well, okay it's really only the second last, but it was the worst one...).
This particular bed had a massive amount of shasta daisies in it which were trying to take over that entire bed. The daisies were just starting to open and there was a sea of white buds at the tops of tall green stems. I hated to dig out the healthy clumps daisies, but some of them were growing at the front of the bed and were choking out my oriental poppy and my minuet wiegela (which, low and behold, was not dead as I had first thought)!  I like shasta daisies because they are one of the first perennials to bloom and often they will bloom a second time later in the summer although not as profusely. But once you have them, you have to be ruthless because they are self seeding in a HUGE way. Very pushy daisies!

I cut all the tall daisy stems off before I dug out the clumps of daisies. (I now have 3 vases full of daisies in the kitchen and dining room. :) I have plans for some of the daisy clumps. My neighbor wants a few and I think I will plant the rest in various locations around our acreage and in the environmental reserve. I hate to just throw them in the compost.

I had to dig out quite a lot of grass roots again, as well. After all the rain we had, the soil was very soft and the grass roots came out easily. I planted calendula and ice flowers (Livingstone daisies) at the front of that bed and added a few white alyssum.  I also transplanted the oriental poppy closer to the front of the bed  and planted a new echinacea (cone flower) there as well. I hope this one is a little more successful than the last one which really struggled for a few years, but now has given up the ghost, it seems.  I love cone flowers, but they are very slow to come up in the spring and they take several years to get established before the growth really amounts to anything. I have one echinacea that looked great last year after growing for 2 years, so I have high hopes for that one again this year, but the rest are still pretty small.   I also added a couple mimulous annuals to that bed. They did well there last year, so I thought I'd try them there again.

After 4 hours of planting, weeding and dead heading spent flowers, I felt like I had accomplished quite a bit. (And also felt quite exhausted!) It's a very satisfying feeling, though, having planted so many of the bedding plants from the picnic table on the deck out into the flower beds or into their designated pots now, into their homes for the duration of this gardening season.