Clipping and Cleaning Up

Clematises are starting to bloom

I have been weeding my flower beds, pulling out long grass and cleaning up some of my perennials in the last few days. My daisies are almost all starting to go to seed so I have cut off most of them now. It was wonderful while they lasted, but I don't need 2000 new daisy plantlets sprouting up!  Some of the maltese crosses are finished blooming, too so I have to be diligent and clip them down as well.

The hummingbirds have been visiting regularly and they seem to love the delphiniums, the lavatara and the newly opened hollyhocks. They are completely ignoring the hummingbird feeder. Maybe it's time to rinse it out and fill it up with fresh solution, although I read that hummingbirds actually prefer the flowers so maybe I should just bring  the feeder in altogether.

Speaking of feeder, I got my husband a new bird feeder for this birthday and we put it up last week. It is much bigger than the old one and is  5 sided so it allows more birds to feed at the same time than the old feeder.  have seen a lot of American Goldfinches there still sporting their bright yellow and black feathers. Have seen some that look like goldfinches but are a duller colour so I tend to think that they are the goldfinch juveniles (newly hatched finches). Have also seen some birds at the feeder that I can't identify yet. That's always intriguing!

My red current shrub was covered with aphids when I got home from a week in Winnipeg so I sprayed it with Neem oil solution. I could tell something was up as soon as I looked at it. Many of the leaves were deformed and lumpy looking. When I flipped them over I could see the pale green aphids on the undersides of the leaves. Because of all the rain we've had, I think I might have to re-spray it, though. The berries are plentiful, however and are turning red quickly. They are quite tart tasting so I usually leave them for the birds to enjoy.

"Smelling the flowers"

The saskatoon berries are ripening fast! We have an abundance of saskatoon shrubs on our acreage and there are many more tall shrubs beside the trail to the lake. I picked some on 2 occasions already and we have been enjoying them on our cereal and in our fruit salad.

I tried cleaning up my wild flower bed at the end of the yard a little. I clipped off much of the tall grass stems and pulled out stems of a tall weed which I couldn't recognize.  They were encroaching on my newly replanted peonies ( 'newly', meaning this spring...) which need the sunshine to grow and hopefully produce flowers next year. One of my old original peony plants has one big fat bud on it! (Only one!) I'm afraid that, sadly, I'm going to miss seeing it bloom at all this year, though.

I clipped the huge monster of a gooseberry bush at the back of that bed, too. That's no easy task either because it has huge prickly thorns on the stems. Come fall I will definitely have to go back there and trim the heck out of it, as it has overshadowed a lot of that flower bed already. The gooseberries on it are ripening, but I don't know who would want to risk harvesting them for fear of getting scratched! Some brave little birds, maybe....

Geraniums, pansies and lobelia