Argentine Skies salvia June came and went. If parts of spring seemed to crawl by, June and the rest of summer are zooming by. Someone up north posted about noticing signs of fall migration beginning and I thought, NOOOOOO! But I too have noticed a slight change in the light already, life is shifting for the downward slant into another season. We’re still well in the height of summer but the movements are already in place. Black and Blue salvia Verbesina alternifolia, wingstem. I accidentally pulled a lot of these seedlings up earlier in the spring, mistaking them for their cousin frostweed, which I also have planted in the garden.…

June has proven to be incredibly busy for work so any of the intermittent downtime I had in April and May has gone *poof*! Which is one reason my writing here has tapered off once again. I did want to share two little nature bits from the yard yesterday evening that I took with my phone. I still feel a little bit traitorous when taking “good” photos with my phone. Like, I should really go get the point and shoot at least, right? And yet there’s that convenience factor of shooting on my phone so I can easily upload and share and that wins out. The photos from my phone…

Several years ago now we had a great bloom of Lauren’s Grape Poppy in the flower garden. I’ve always wanted to recreate that year but have never been successful. This year a single poppy came up, I think from seeds I dispersed last year, and proceeded to put on blooms! It was so beautiful and reminded me of why I love this particular variety so much. I believe it comes true from saved seed so I will be saving what seed we get this year and sowing them again next year! Maybe I’ll get the large flush of blooms I was hoping for again.

Yesterday I spent the majority of the day moving a load of mulch and doing various gardening tidying activities. I had wanted to move this particular load of mulch back in March after we moved a different load of mulch but then everything shut down and that didn’t happen. I was getting tired of weeds appearing in many of the unmulched areas over the last two months so I asked Chris to get another load for me now that things are open again. I’m only disappointed that it did not come with a couple of kolaches for breakfast from Kolache Factory as it typically did in the Before Times. Such…

A couple weeks ago I noticed something chowing down on our Turk’s cap hibiscus and took a few photos thinking they were caterpillars. I wasn’t having any luck with iNaturalist so I grabbed the caterpillar book and started flipping through. A few Families gave me some ideas but then I continued to hit a dead end. That’s when I took to Googling caterpillars and Turk’s cap hibiscus and started sifting through the images. There was a photo of a sawfly larvae and then I recalled another iNaturalist entry sometime in the last year where someone had thought it to be a caterpillar but it turned out to be a saw…

It’s been a good spring for the irises down by the pond. The species plants of Iris virginica have really thrived and grown into large clumps over the last few years. Chris has also been adding various cultivars of Louisiana iris as well and those have really added some color to the pond fringe! Don’t ask about specific names because those are long gone but we can still admire the form and colors of these flowers. The front ROW ditch where we’d also planted various Louisiana irises over the years has not resulted in any blooms this year, though the plants themselves have spread well. A good cleaning up around…