Weeding and Watering

While weeding I've been noticing that the flower gardens are getting kind of dry. I used to be able to rely on the lawn as my indicator for when things were getting dry, but now that we have the automatic sprinklers it sneaks up on me sometimes. Today I dug the sprinklers out of the shed and set them up to do some watering.

Years ago Jeff came home with this cheap yellow sprinkler. I love it, it's easy to set up and it works well. We have two green sprinklers that cost more and have metal tubing and just look like they are high quality. They are crummy and don't work nearly as well. I guess it just goes to show that you can't tell anything based on looks alone.

There was a very nice surprise waiting out in the garden tonight. For a long time I have longed for pink irises. Every now and then you see them, a few in someone's garden, and they are always lovely. So a few years ago I found an iris at a nursery that had a tag indicating it was pink, snapped it up, and popped it in the garden. It has lived, and I think there was a single bloom one year, but it hasn't done much beyond that.

Tonight, for the first time, this pink iris is covered in blooms. There must be at least half a dozen, and it is just gorgeous. Patience pays off! The iris borer may have taken my grape-bubblegums, but it left these pinks, and for that I am grateful.

I tied up the last of the peonies tonight. The ones in the back yard are blooming beautifully, the ones out front are full of big fat buds. It's funny how little differences in site can change bloom times like that.

Out front the Johnsons's blue sanguineum is blooming, the fuchsia sanguineum and columbine are blooming in Ian's garden. The lilacs are blooming and smell incredible, I catch their scent as I'm moving around the yard. Surprising me by being so early, the delphiniums have budded out hugely and are going to have some gorgeous flowers in the next couple days. A few other plants are going now, the nepeta, coral bells, and the azalea have all been blooming for a while. It's not exactly a riot of bloom out there though, and the garden definitely needs more things that bloom in May.

Another neat thing that showed up this year is in the vegetable garden. We always have a salad garden with lettuce and spinach, and last year I pulled all the plants, but was a little late; the lettuce had bolted and been out there for a while.

This year we have lettuce coming up from seed that must have fallen from the old bolted plants last summer. It's scattered in a very naturalistic manner, and kind of makes me think of how the rule for planting naturalized bulbs is to throw them on the ground and plant them where they fall. That's what they look like, just planted where they fell.