Good morning, and hold on! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
After a couple of beautiful days in the 80s last weekend, mid-week we started catching the edge of the wild weather to the east of Colorado. On Wednesday we had cloud cover and a little rain, and the start of a whole bunch of wind. We’ve had gusts into the 50s over the last few days. At least we’ve missed the tornados that have been hitting the plains.
I really, really, really hate the wind.
But at least bearded iris are sturdy enough to stand the blasts; the poppies don’t fare nearly as well.
As I wander around the yard, or around the neighborhood, I see the lingering effects of that very late, very hard freeze we had in early April — when we had a record-setting low of only 9°.
Like this rosebud — isn’t it pretty? It’s on the Zephirine Drouhin own-root bush I planted a couple of years ago, that’s really just coming into its own this year.
Well, until you wander around to the other side of the bud, and find a fine family of aphids come for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Hmmmm…. I’ve only seen a couple of ladybugs this year and I usually have a lot of them. I think the freeze wiped out a lot of my native supply. Need to go to a nursery and buy some.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of young trees and bushes showing the same odd pattern of growth seen on the Korean lilac next to my front porch.
On the left side of the photo, the bush is fully leafed out and is blooming; the right side is the same plant — with scattered new leaves just barely emerging from what looked like dead branches just a few days ago. I’m waiting until later in the season to figure out exactly what portions of the plant is really dead, kind of dead, or resurrected.
At least a lilac bush will recover — I’m not so sure about some of the trees I’ve seen around town.
I still have a load of plants sitting on my front porch waiting to be planted — strawberries and thyme to replace the plants lost to the weird spring; some agastache and penstemon to fill in a back bed, and the melon plants that have finished hardening off and are ready to go into the veggie patch. Perhaps the wind will die down enough to get that done this weekend.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?