Awesome August

July is gone and August has sneaked in. The weather continues to be hot, dry and sunny, although I had hoped for a bit of a relief from that. I prefer the temps to stay at around 24C with a nice little breeze to keep down the mosquitos. Forecast for mid week is some much needed rain! Yay!
We had thunder clouds roll in the odd time recently, but no precipitation to speak of. We also, thankfully, did not get the vicious hail here at Buffalo Lake that Red Deer and parts west got!

Daylilies bloomed profusely in July and are just winding down now in August 

My garden continues to flourish. The veggies are at the harvesting stage. We had our first feed of new potatoes last week, one of our garden grown spaghetti squashes and even a small carrot or two!  We have been eating the garden lettuce and swiss chard for weeks now, as well as the cucumbers from our little greenhouse. They have been growing almost before our very eyes!

Morden Belle left corner and  Morden blush have finished blooming now in Aug. 

The flowers are winding down somewhat  and I have had to clip off many so they don't throw seeds everywhere.  One of the August beauties is my tall heliopsis with its abundance of yellow flowers in the centre of my angel bed.  The hollyhocks also continue to please, especially the dark pink ones in the stackstone bed by the birdhouse.

hollyhocks

The roses have pretty much finished blooming now, except for the Morden Ruby which continues to excel! It was the first rose bush to bloom in early June and has not stopped since !   The Tall John Davis climber in the Angel bed still has blossoms as well.  The Turbo rose which I bought this spring  had a massive amount of blossoms and has a lot of buds still to open! It is still in a pot outside the greenhouse door. Not the best location, but it does get a fair amount of sun. I need to figure out a permanent spot for it, by September though….

Morden Ruby rose, with Firebird dahlias on right, potentilla on left

The hosts are blooming nicely especially once I clipped down the tall maltese crosses that were squeezing them out.

Hostas

My flower tubs have all done well. The ones down by the road need constant watering because we have had to little rain in the past 4 weeks; just a sprinkle or two which only resulted in less than an eighth inch of precipitation. (3 mm?)  The hot weather continued into August with +30C sunny days almost too hot to be out in for the first 12 days! Any yard work had to be done in the morning before 10:30 am!

This past week it has cooled down and we have had some overcast days which is  a nice change. 

The bad news is that we may be in for some frost tonight (Aug 22) here at the lake, but hopefully not! 

Tangerine Begonias continue to please

Summer Pond Disasters

Flower bed and small pond

In mid July, we lost half of our pond goldfish! The weather had been brutally hot for almost 10 days  and the green algae in the pond went crazy!  The oxygen levels in the pond dropped due to those conditions and the goldfish were gasping for air!

The pond filter that we had bought last year was too small and couldn't do an adequate job, as we discovered. We had added water to the pond several times via the hose, but that was merely a bandaid.

Usually we have string algae in our pond, which I fish out with the net periodically. This summer we had none of that type, but lots of green algae instead which made the water look like pea soup!

We had had a lot of overnight visitors for 2 weeks and the pond filter did not get cleaned out as it should have.  That particular morning I saw some of the goldfish floating on the surface, not a good sign!
We quickly began to drain the whole pond and net the remaining fish. We put the goldfish into a large rubbermaid container on the covered deck and ran the air bubbler into it to give them lots of oxygen. We ended up losing almost half of the 14 goldfish though.  Only 8 fish remained.  We lost 2 of our biggest breeding goldfish.  :(

Blanket flowers, delphiniums, pink bee balm, red maltese cross, white baby's breath, blue monkshood and calico kitty, Lexy.

After scrubbing the algae off the sides of the pond and off the rocks with the pressure washer and the push broom, we sucked the green water out with the shop vac.  Then we re-filled the pond with fresh water from the well pump via the hose.
We drove to the city the next day and bought a new pump system to work the filter. We now use both pumps, the old pump just to run the little fountain in the middle of the pond and the new pump runs the filter.
After letting the sun warm up the cold well water for a few hours we transferred the goldfish into the freshly cleaned pond.  I added some liquid Cycle to the pond water which contains millions of beneficial algae.

We also added a mesh bag of barley straw to the pond, which we had bought at the hardware store along with the pump.  Barley straw supposedly breaks down in about 2 weeks time and releases a natural chemical in the water which deters the growth of algae.
Problem solved!

Angel bed with monkshood, delphiniums, red maltese cross and yellow day lilies

Well, not quite! Three days ago I went to check the pond and there was barely 2 inches of water left in it! Oh no! … Did our pond membrane spring a leak!?!?!  The goldfish were all huddled at the bottom next to the pump with barely enough water to cover the big ones.  Turns out the little fountain in the centre of our narrow pond had tiled at a 45 degree angle and the water was fountaining right out of the pond and watering our very dry lawn! (Again we have had a very hot, sunny, dry spell of weather.)

Luckily we caught the problem before it completely drained the pond!  We fixed the little centre fountain and reduced its spray at the same time as we re-filled the pond once more.  Those poor goldfish seem to have suicidal tendencies!  There are at least 7 out of 8 left (it's difficult to see all of them and count them since they move so fast.)  I hope they all survive the summer. In these stressful conditions, they probably won't have any babies.



The little chickadees, finches, sparrows and other birds were having a heyday as the pond was filling up. They flitted around, having little drinks and bathing in the fresh water.  It was quite delightful to see them!

Hopefully we have no further pond issues this summer!

My beautiful Morden Ruby

Happy gardening!