Nice shots of these. The rose moss is really pretty hanging over that wall. My stargazer lilies just started blooming too. They smell so good:) That red daylily is very nice looking. Vickie

I have so many of the Phil Korth daylilies open today, it just looks marvelous up there. But nothing new so no new Korth intro pictures today. That big gold daylily, DOC WEBSTER, has another bloom and they are just so attention getting. It just goes to prove that it doesn't always have to be the fanciest of flowers with all the ruffles to get the glory.

YES! We are doing laundry together, sistah! You won't believe it, but today, the place gave me the keys to the hearse and I drove it WAY out to a service, casket and all. Then afterwards, I loaded it back up and drove back. Did 2 services today for a full day and my dogs are barking! I really should stop wearing my black leather boots with the high heels to these things! :) Tomorrow, the kids have some excitement planned, but my day will be spent with the lovely Raeanne, in front of matching washer and dryer set, being a domestic engineer. I read reviews on a couple of books that sound good, so I ordered them for summer reading: The Interruption of Everything By Terry McMillan "As Marilyn approaches middle-age, we follow her struggle to discover herself outside the constraints of a passionless marriage, a demanding family and an ever-growing list of dreams deferred. With three children in college, a husband who suffers from destructive professional and personal inertia, a demanding mother-in-law, a senile mother and a drug-addicted sister, Marilyn has more on her plate than she expected at this stage of the game. Torn between taking care of her friends and family and attending to her own needs, she's faced with choices, like deciding to finish her graduate degree, that never before seemed hers to make. Along the way, supporting characters like Marilyn's feisty little niece and supportive-yet-opinionated best friends Paulette and Bunny add humor and depth to our heroine's character. And as always, McMillan does a flawless job of incorporating humor into even the most traumatic situations, as evidenced by a scene in which Marilyn ends up babysitting her hairdresser's children while waiting twelve hours for new braids. ("At three, Blue has to make a run. Orange has to go to the bank to get a money order. I ask Lexus to find me a Pamper and I take the baby in the bathroom.") Warm and witty, sincere and heartfelt, The Interruption of Everything is sure to delight McMillan devotees and attract a host of new fans. --Gisele Toueg" and The Friend Who Got Away:Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendship the Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away By Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell "Editors Offill and Schappell offer ostensibly the first book on lost friendship between women: 20 accounts of bonds that faltered, snapped, or slowly disappeared. Some of them are torch songs; some express anguish on a par with that of divorce; some are sly, tongue-in-cheek explanations of "lifelong" friendship's tenure. "I do not believe in . . . Meaningful Talks, except when they relate to . . . hair or makeup," opines one woman. "Otherwise, confrontations, in my opinion, serve only to make the plaintiff feel better for making the other person feel bad. I hold those I am really fond of to a lower standard than I do other people." Another contributor, one of a trio of friends, finds that her three miscarriages ruined the mythical story ("that wildness of being the same") of the threesome's bond. By breaking the silence about failed friendship so literately, this book appeals to many more readers than just students of interpersonal psychology. Whitney Scott Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved" These books sound like interesting summer fluff for me. Anybody else? Oh! DeeMarie, BTW, I love Janet books! You may also find you like Nevada Barr. I always actually learn something from the Nevada Barr books, since she throws in actual facts about whatever she's writing the mystery about. Try her Lake Superior book as a start if you feel like it. Okay, I'm done!

Nancy, Thank you. You know, when Jesse was first diagnosed with cancer, we were deeply concerned---when you are starting out at Stage 4, there is not necessarily a lot of hope. Still, we hoped treatment would have help him live as long as possible. When it became apparent that nothing would ease his intense physical pain, then instead we began to pray for God to end his suffering. So, why does it hurt so much that God answered our prayers? Oh, I know there is no real good answer for that....but we all remain shell-shocked by his loss. I think we all just thought he was invincible and would live forever. So, this morning when I went outside to put out the cracked corn for the doves and the sunflower seeds for the cardinals, there was a herd of 7 deer waiting for me---and I was out an hour earlier than usual. The deer acted irritated. What is their problem? There ought to be plenty for them to eat out in the wild. So, the biggest buck (I've dubbed him Kyle's deer, because our friend Kyle hunts west of our house on land inherited by his grandparents, Jesse and Joyce, and he always gets a big buck that has been feeding at our place in summer and autumn) decided he wanted to engage with me in warfare this morning. He came right at me, lowering his head/antlers and tossing them into the air and waggling his head a little playfully. I yelled No at him and told him to retreat. We had a barbed wire fence and about 20' between us. Instead, he came right up to the barbed wire as if he were going to jump it, putting him about 10' from me (I had the pickup between us though), and I retreated to the garage, with the cracked corn and sunflower seeds still in my bucket. I went to a different area and fed the mourning doves and cardinals (they watch me and follow wherever I go with their breakfast) and told the deer I don't mind them stealing some of the bird food, but I'm not going to put up with aggressive behavior. When the deer start thinking the bird-feeding area is their territory, I stop feeding the wild birds there. From this point forward, I'll feed close to the house instead of close to the compost pile until the deer get the message and back off. They probably still will creep up close to the house and steal bird seed, but not while the dogs are out in the dog yard, as they are now, close to the bird seed. The garden is simply full of butterflies today, and those dreaded oleander aphids are back in the garden on the butterfly weed this morning...but there are lady bugs there eating them. Let's hope the lady bugs can stay on top of them. We started out our day here with fog, condensation on the windows and 99% humidity. I cannot help thinking that our temperature and heat index will be much worse today than yesterday, because the rain-cooled air yesterday really did give us surprisingly pleasant weather for so late in July. Our max heat index was only 100 yesterday, and I do not think we hit that until late afternoon after the clouds broke up. With the fog and clouds this morning, we started out cool but humid and now that the clouds are breaking up and melting away, I expect it will be smart to spend the rest of today indoors. Jennifer, Chick management is really time-consuming, and I'm just glad those days are behind us. We used to have so very many chickens and I miss having that many, but I don't miss all the work associated with it. The five we have now are the perfect number. I would assume that, yes, your neighbors are watering their fields for the sake of maintaining forage for their livestock. There is a place a few miles south of us that does the same for their goats and horses. I guess it is a matter of whether the livestock owner wants to feed their animals on green pasture this time of year by spending the money for irrigation or if they want to spend the money on hay or bagged feed instead. Also, depending on the lay of the land and how common grass fires or wildfires are when it gets dry, it can pay off to keep at least one field well-watered and green to reduce the fire danger. Yes, green fields will burn, but they are slower to ignite, so it buys time for firefighters to get there and get a fire out, or for livestock owners to get home and move their animals to a place safer from a nearby fire. Don't let the wilting of plants in hot weather get to you. Just remind yourself that they are transpiring water out more quickly than they can take it in due to the heat and that transpiration process is essential for plant survival....don't we humans all continue to breathe and sweat out in the heat? Of course we do. Just let the plants do what they do and don't worry. It is only worrisome if they are not recovering from the wilting in the cool overnight hours. I don't worry about wilted plants in the daylight hours or the early evening hours. I might worry if they weren't beginning to bounce back by dusk, and would be worried if they still were wilted in the early morning. Hailey, Over the years, I have used several different kinds of drip irrigation systems. It is really complicated in our sloping front garden, which slopes downhill so strongly from south to north and also downhill from west to east that I have to use pressure-compensating emitters. I like to set up shut-off valves on different raised beds, so I can exclude any given bed from irrigation if it doesn't need it just by turning the knob on the valve. It is much easier to set up drip irrigation in the more level back garden or in the landscaping around the house. Go to the website of Dripworks and read their blogs and FAQs and you can learn how to set up driplines that will serve you best. I don't know if they still do it, but it used to be that they would help you design your system too. You can start with one of their drip irrigation kits if you see one that you think will fit your needs, and it is easy to add on more lines and emitters to any of the kits if you need to cover more space. My biggest issue with drip irrigation is that in the back garden, once the voles discovered there was water in those lines, they started chewing them in dry months, which means lots of repairs have to be made constantly. So, I'm less in love with drip irrigation than I used to be----but it does work great if you don't have voles. Soaker hoses work well also, but don't hold up for nearly as long to the sun's UV rays. You do need to lift, dry out and store your drip irrigation system each autumn so there's no water left in the lines to crack the lines and emitters in freezing weather. Beneficial insects are not purely good guys for sure, but they're still the best helpers we have. I absolutely refuse to release praying mantids. There is no logic in it. If you put out an egg case and dozens (or hundreds), guess how many you end up with within a very few short months? One. You end up with one, because they eat each other and, in the end, only the one survives because he or she outlasted all the others. They also eat other beneficial insects, butterflies and hummingbirds. Now, I won't kill a praying mantis if I see it, but I'm never really happy to see them either, and I won't buy them and release them here on purpose. It took me only one time to learn not to do that. Blister beetles are another perfect example. If you have a handful around, and if they aren't clustering on one plant and eating it to death, then they are beneficial because they eat grasshopper eggs. But, if you have hundreds or even thousands of them, then there is nothing beneficial about their presence at all. Lady bugs? Don't we love the lady bugs? Sure we do, but they'll eat butterfly eggs and probably very small, newly hatched butterfly larvae, so.....shrug....what's a gardener to do? How about wasps? When I see a wasp carrying away an armyworm from the garden, I am happy, but I also know that same wasp doesn't discriminate---it will prey on the butterfly caterpillars for whom we plant host plants. I just try to provide an ecosystem where they all can thrive, but we have to remember that everybody in the garden eats something and also gets eaten by something, so there's that. A fall trip to Bustani sounds lovely, but I'm not sure one will be in the works for us this fall. It depends on the degree of ongoing drought probably. I definitely want to make that trip next Spring because I'm going to redo our landscaping around the house, and plan to drag Jana and Chris along so they can see Bustani for themselves. Rebecca, I think funerals help a great deal with closure. My strongest feeling after my aunt's and Jesse's funerals yesterday was just a sense of relief---that feeling that we had celebrated their lives and said good-bye to them, and offered comfort to their families. I do understand that some people don't want a funeral service for themselves, though, and we have to respect their wishes, but it is harder to feel a sense of closure in cases like that. Hailey, That's a black blister beetle. I kill them if they are devouring plants...in my garden they will eat cucumber plants right down to the ground, but if there's just a few and they aren't concentrating on one specific type of plant, I try to ignore them. They eat tons of grasshopper eggs, so usually are beneficial in that sense. I usually see a lot of blister beetles either in the same year that there's a bad grasshopper outbreak, or in the following year. If they clustering are on your tomato plants in any appreciable number (I'll ignore them if I see only 1 or 2 per plant), then they need to die. I cut them in half with scissors and get about 75% of them on the first try. It sometimes takes a few days of snipping with the scissors to get them all. Farmgardener, That's exactly how I deadhead my coneflowers, and I never get volunteers. I think the birds eat all the seedheads, or my mulch is so thick the that the seeds never find soil. Or, and this is a really good possibility, the red harvester ants may feed all the seeds and carry them off---I see them carrying stuff out of the garden all day long. Thanks. I agree with you that as we get older, the losses pile on more and more quickly. Only my mom and one aunt remain from their generation in our family, and that is sort of hard to think about. What we are going through is nothing new---everyone goes through the same, but between friends and family, we just seem to have a lot of that happening this year within a fairly short time frame. We'll get through it. It is, after all, such a blessing to have such wonderful. much-loved people in your lives that you suffer such grief at their loss. Megan, Thank you. Two in one day was a lot and I did nothing but collapse on the couch when we got home. Except for feeding animals and watering the garden, I'm not doing anything today either. I know I need to rest and decompress. Well, I already did a load of laundry, but you know how that is....laundry, like death and taxes, is inevitable, and I hate to let it pile up. I need to go read what our state climatologist, Gary McManus, said about the impending flash drought. Isn't he brilliant? I love his writing. I know he must be highly educated to hold his career position, but I love the humor he exhibits in the Mesonet ticker and in his FB posts. He makes the climate and weather so easy to understand, and sometimes with our climate and weather, if we didn't laugh, we'd cry. I think he uses humor to get our attention so then he can feed us the facts we need to know. I'm gearing up, too, to start cool-season seeds. I really cannot put anything in the ground, in terms of cool-season plants, until at least October and sometimes not until November if the hot weather holds on, but I want to have plants ready when the timing is right. The last few years, we have had temperatures hang on, even into the 100s and upper 90s, through the end of September, so I cannot get into too much of a hurry. The grow cart looks fine if it meets your needs. My first one wasn't too much larger than that---it had three shelves I think. All of mine have been homemade--plastic assemble-it-yourself shelving from Lowe's or Home Depot, with shop lights suspended from shelves by chains that we can raise or lower. No matter what size you get, it won't be big enough. I learned that from experience. As much as I love gardening, I no longer try to keep crops going all winter. I used to, but it was inevitable that when I was really busy with Christmas or winter fire season or whatever, I'd have kale, mustard, spinach, turnips, etc. demanding to be harvested and it just made it all so stressful since I have zero control over when wildfires break out in winter. Or, I'd be gone to a wildfire all day, or for several days in a row, and then not at home in the evening to put row covers over the plants if a particularly bitter cold night is expected, and that was stressful too. Nowadays I'm just happy to keep a few simple things going all winter in the flower border inside the garden---pansies, dianthus, stock, ornamantal cabbage and ornamental kale, etc. If I plant them too early, the pests devour the cabbage and kale, so there's no point in getting into too much of a hurry. I think that Lowe's and HD here get their transplants of those things in the store in serious numbers in late Sept or early Oct, and they don't keep them long because the live plants get in the way of Christmas merchandise, so it is easier to grow my own and have them ready at the time best for me. Of course, we never know when an early autumn freeze will come, but in recent years those have been very few and far between. Have a good rest of the day y'all. Since it is hot and I promised myself a lazy day today, I'm going to make a list of things to plant in next year's cutting garden, which will be the change of pace from growing an edible garden that I've been craving. Am I worried that in January or February, I'll panic because I'm not planting all the usual veggies? Of course I am, but I really want to do something different. I just realized that I get to be REALLY lazy today. I don't have to cook dinner because tonight is our quarterly VFD Fire Board meeting and Tim goes straight from work to that meeting, eating fast food on the way because there's no time to stop at home and have a real meal. I feel really, really bad for Tim and all our fire board members. Jesse has been (always and forever, I think, since the VFD was founded in 2002) the Fire Board Chairman, so tonight, of necessity, they will need to decide whether a current fire board member will step up and become the chairman, or if they want to recruit a new community member to fill that role. I think that is a hard thing to do just one day after his funeral. I'm going to be content today to sit here with my notebook and gardening catalogs and make lists of things I want to grow for the fall cool season and for next year's cutting garden. There's so many options available since I'm not having to save space for veggies. I think I'm going to make the back garden a wildflower/pollinator garden too. When I say I'm taking a break from edibles, I really mean it, except for tomatoes and peppers in container right next to the back door. Dawn