The Formosa lilies grew tall this year, taller than me. They started swelling with buds a few weeks ago and I knew they would be blooming soon. I was worried when we left for the July 4th weekend that the first ones would open without us. But they waited. I love being out in the vegetable garden in the evenings but I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with the flower garden soon. It needs the attention and some doting oohs and ahhs from me as I discover what plants are blooming, what has survived the neglect and weeds. A glance at the abutilon/flowering maple told me that it…

These days I’m finding myself in a state of go-go-go in the gardens. Rarely am I stopping to just see what I see, to sample a bit of what is going on—there are so many weeds to pull, plants to trim back, and who-knows-what-else to do in this frenzy of summer. On Tuesday I got called to pick Forest up early because his low grade fever from the morning had morphed into something a little higher and he was crankier than usual. He’s finally cutting a few more teeth and paired with allergies that keep trying to turn into another cold, he wasn’t feeling very well. We settled in for…

Do I dare say that it’s hot? I mean, it is summer. That’s what summer is about. But it’s slowly turning into the phase of summer where anything after 11am until after 5pm you don’t want to venture out unless you are swimming in water. It’s almost like winter where we hibernate for awhile inside. For most of the garden plants this is their thriving point of the year, such as the daturas. They’ve grown by leaps and bounds and are flowering away, already producing seed pods to spring forth new progeny next year. In the compost bin an unknown cucurbit sprouted and has since climbed about 12′ up the…

I took these photos on April 19th and since then I haven’t been able to find more caterpillars or any chrysalises despite seeing quite a few monarch butterflies flitting about and landing on the milkweed as well as additional eggs throughout the month. I’m not sure if they are being predated on or if our storms shortly after taking these photos influenced their outcome. Likely a combination of both which is a little depressing. It’s been a little hectic around here and while I’ve had plenty of things to write I’ve been trying to stay on top of multiple things. We went camping over the weekend and I’ve processed all…

We’ve never had a ton of monarchs in our garden, not compared to what we had in our Florida gardens, but they’ve always been a transient butterfly throughout the spring and summer migration months here in Texas. This year, however, it seems as if we’ve had a few more than usual and some have been laying eggs on the milkweed! I suspect we will be needing to purchase more milkweed soon. This particular milkweed is Asclepias curassavica, or tropical milkweed, though we have another species that we picked up at another nursery that was unmarked as to what species and hasn’t leafed out enough for us to try to identify.…