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