Good morning, and it's looking rosy. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver's monsoonal weather panel has continued to make late July extremely pleasant this year. This week although we did hit the mid-90s early on, by later in the week we were down to the lower 80s. And we've had our daily evening cool down, even if my yard received less than a quarter-inch of actual rain.
And, in contrast to the front flower beds, in the back yard I'm having a stellar year. The back yard runs about two weeks behind the front during the spring warm up, so the unseasonably cold early spring didn't cause as much damage to the back yard perennials as it did to the front.
Like the Rose of Sharon: it has more flowers on it than I've ever seen before.
The melon plants are also covered with blossoms… and with baby melons. These are "True Charentais" from Pinetree Garden Seeds. Which, I suppose, is appropriate, as the melon vines are working hard at covering everything. A daily task is going out and tucking run-away vines back to their vertical supports so they sprawl up, rather than all over the veggie patch. The Mister asked if I was concerned about providing support for the melons themselves, but in my previous two years of growing melons I've had no problems with them dropping from the vines before they were ripe — then again, when the melons are close to ripe I hover over them, checking daily before they have a chance to drop on their own!
Last week in the comments, mcjoan talked about replacing turf with xeric plantings in the parking strip (what I believe you benighted easterners refer to with the oxymoronic "tree lawn" — lawns don't grow under trees!) by her corner lot. The Mister and I had our planter boxes built for exactly that purpose: low-maintenance, drought hardy plants that we wouldn't have to water, mow, or do much of anything with.
It's hard getting the right blend of bloom time and toughness with just perennials, so I've also become reliant on self-seeding flowers, whether annual or perennial to fill in. Mentioned in the comments were corn and California poppies, Johnny jump ups and mat daisies. I forgot to mention blue flax — what would I do without it?
And jayden added to the diversity of my patch (a very important consideration in getting continuous blooming action) by sending me four of one of his favorite plants, turnera, or white buttercup. I'll pop them into the ground this morning.
Self-seeders may also solve my neighbor's problem with a planter built by a former owner under a bay window at the front of their house. The thing's a mess — a full southern exposure, it's full of bindweed, and the bay window blocks rainfall. Right now the only thing alive in it is bindweed and a bunch of struggling daylilies. The plan is to first eradicate as much bindweed as possible at this stage, and in the fall and next spring we'll scatter seeds from my garden to see what takes.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?