Still, I've been reading some terrific stuff lately about how perfectionism is the death of productivity and creativity and probably more important things like the Oxford comma, so... here goes. Here's what's blooming in my neck of the woods.
Daylilies! A couple years ago my mom's husband's niece (still with me?) moved to a house in Wichita that had previously been home to an older gentleman who had been a member of the Wichita Daylily Society (how wild and raucous do you reckon those meetings are?) and had planted all kinds of daylilies all over the yard. This niece isn't much of a flower person (fortunately I have met her and she is exceedingly nice, and thus did not allow my brain to judge her too harshly), and so chose to do the right thing and gave a bunch to me. Well, she gave buckets-full to my mom and Mark, and they shared some with me. Whatever. So this year I have several new and unexpected splashes of color around our yard, although I can already tell I'm going to need to re-transplant several varieties; not enough sun on some of them.
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| This one came with a little plaque that reads "'Firepower' E.W. Brown-1984." I'm assuming E.W. is the person who created this hybrid? Or something? |
The next two were already here; I planted them a few years ago. I love them just as much as the flashy new guys, and tell them so every time I'm outside.
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| These are less orange and more of a buttery-yellow outside of my demon camera. |
The above red ones look similar to the Huning lilies I wrote about recently, except they have more red and aren't taller than I am. They're wet because it never stops raining in Iowa. At least not this summer.
The coneflowers are also blooming:
They're usually home to a few spiderwebs:
And speaking of spiderwebs-
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| I'm convinced Viktor weaves these webs nightly, doing his part to protect our family. |
You can't take two steps across our grass without encountering one of these. It's funny, spiders completely eek me out when they're in the house, but outside, I want to see as many as possible, perhaps because this is what our children look like right now:
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| Click to embiggen and see Cade's poor, poor forehead. |
A cool, wet summer means millions upon millions of mosquitoes, all feasting upon the flesh of my babies. This angers me. It angers me greatly.
Not all the bugs are ire-provoking, however. I spent an absurd amount of time watching this little fella on a sunflower leaf this morning. He was right at eye-level, after all.
Anybody know what this multi-colored friend might be? Because I am, as usual, clueless.
The vegetable garden's sending out its first produce of the summer (aside from the mass quantities of lettuce it attempted to drown us in, of course):
And look here- the gourds are starting to grow! I could have sworn I planted 10 Commandments here, but this doesn't look quite right, so... blargh. One of these years I really, really will start a gardening journal. I mean it this time.
The zucchini are also just gearing up, and it's beginning to look like I'm going to be breaking and entering people's homes just to leave some surprise zucchini and get it out of my garden. I'll be the Zucchini Fairy, which is like the Tooth Fairy except I won't traffic in human body parts!
That's it: An Iowa garden in July. Thanks for hosting, CHM!
