Thursday 20 July 2017

Walk Around Wednesday- Blooms, Cat, Rain and more

Yes, I realize it is Thursday, but I planned on posting this yesterday, using photos I took on Tuesday. Come for a walk around the property with me.


-spiderwort


-close up of spiderwort bloom


-daylilies are in bloom - beautiful sunny yellow, so eye catching across the yard


-a soft, peachy orange


-a gorgeous, hot reddish orange daylily


-one of my favourites, these are big, sturdy blooms


-I like the colour combination of the "hot" daylilies with purple sandcherry


I only have two roses. This Hansa is normally quite healthy and prolific, but it didn't get cut back properly, so it has had to move forward from a severe cutting back too late this spring and is only now showing a couple of blooms. I'm not much of a rose officiando.


-taller cranesbill are now blooming and fill in spaces in most of my beds


-best year yet!


-purple coneflowers (Echinacea)


-one of my most favourite - crocosmia         -didn't realize how blurry this photo was until I uploaded it :( 


I am quite happy I took pictures of the current blooms, because naturally this morning began with thunder and torrential downpours. These pictures do not capture the intensity of the rain...




Scooter-the-cat-with-no-tail managed to make his way home through the rain and picked up quite a few sticky seeds in his fur on the way.


He's looking a bit bedraggled. I brushed the seeds out of his fur after he was done eating. I can hear him meowing from the windowsill again, as I am typing this.

How are your gardens growing? For those of you in hot, dry places, I would gladly send you some of our rain if I could!

Oh yes, one final addition: we now seem to be the proud "owners" of a skunk. It crawled under a little low porch (the one I stand on to hang laundry - on the two days it didn't rain), it rummages through my compost container (no I don't put meat scraps in it), and it digs around looking for grubs in the lawn. So far, smell is not a problem, and Scooter has not decided it is his long lost mommy, so we are o.k.  I'm just a little concerned about accidentally surprising it with dire results. Anyone have experience with a resident skunk?


30 comments:

  1. Wonderful looking photos, and what a nice walk around that must have been. Greetings to you!

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  2. I love crocosmia - my favourite variety is Lucifer.
    Also the hardy cranesbill - I have twoblue ones - Russell Pritchard and Johnson's blue and a pink one - Patricia (for obvious reasons)

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    1. I am pretty sure this one is Lucifer. I also have Johnson's blue and love it! Ha! I didn't know that there was a Patricia cranesbill. Perhaps I will get one in your honour, Pat!

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  3. Jenn, Your flowers are so pretty, love all the colors. Poor Scooter...he looks pretty ruffled. :) Blessings to all, xoxo, Susie

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  4. Lovely walk about in the garden, all so beautiful & lush. It seems that this year all the crocosmia are doing well.The hummingbirds love it. Oh poor Scooter although he doesn't look at all fussed by the rain. We had quite the downpour this morning. Daylilies are one of my favourites although I do not have any orange or gold - lots of pinks,purples, lemon yellow & almost white. I've not had a resident skunk, just one that visited nightly for a few weeks (thank goodness) I have read & heard that keeping a radio on 24/7 near the burrow & lights get them to move out pretty quickly as they do not like constant noise. Good luck with getting "him" to move out. ... Mary-Lou =^..^=

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    1. I've heard about the light, too. We don't actually know if skunk is living on our property or just visiting... daily. I would like to have more "pretty" colours of daylilies like pinks and purples. I don't think I even knew they came in white!

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    2. Jenn: The two nearly white but not quite that I have are called; Sunday Gloves and Joan Senior. Sometimes one or two of the blooms have a very very pale yellow stripe in them, so I think the "Mother" plant must have been a pale yellow. ... Mary-Lou =^..^=

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  5. So pretty. My echinacea is already on the wane. Makes me sad as they usually last longer it seems. Triple digits and dry as a bone here. Have to water everyday. We have caught skunks in the havahart traps. Hope she doesn't have her babies under there. I watched a mom carry each little baby in her mouth like a cat to a new home. I read once that even skunks don't like their spray smell. My weenies came running in the house once after a fresh spray, blinking their eyes. It was so strong, it took me a couple of seconds to realize what had happened.

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  6. What a plethora of lovely flowers! I particularly like the shot of the "hot" daylilies with the purple sandcherry . . . gorgeous.

    Scooter looks as though he had a hard night!

    We haven't had a skunk problem in years. (Knock on wood.) When we first moved here, we had one or two living under the back porch (long gone) but apparently they didn't like us as new neighbors and sought living space elsewhere before creating trouble or before we had to figure out how to get rid of them.

    Our garden is finally starting to actually grow as we're actually getting some warm weather. Still frequent rains also. It's all good. :o}

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    1. Oh, you know I'd love some of your raised beds! You and your husband put so much time and work into your gardens. We tend to get one warm day, followed by cooler and raining for a few days, repeat.

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  7. Your garden looks beautiful. We had rain this morning which was really good news for our French garden. It's quite unusual for our grass to still be green in July.

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    1. Yes, we have frequently had brown, dormant lawns by early August, so I guess we should be happy with our lush, green growth.

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  8. I had a skunk under my deck a few years ago. He would dig up a huge amount of turf and earth during the night, I would shovel it all back next morning and pat it down, we would repeat the next day and so on and so on.... Finally one of us got fed up (me) and let things lie. He eventually went away. I think this might have occurred during babies arriving but I only ever saw one adult.

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    1. From what we read, we are to assume that baby skunks might be involved, and just wait until they move away. We've not seen any babies either.

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  9. No idea what to do about skunks, we mostly deal with armadillos and opossums. Your flowers are beautiful. Is you cat tailless by nature, a Manx, or did something happen? We had a Manx years ago, one of my all time favorite cats.

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    1. No armadillos here, but we do see the occasional opossum (rumoured to have come up to Canada on trucks transporting produce from the south). Scooter was born with a tail and a magnificent tail it was, but he had a very unfortunate accident with (the vet thought) a fan belt in a car and so his tail (what was left of it) had to be amputated. He manages quite fine without his tail, but is a strange little beast regardless.

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  10. I'd imagine rain would make a cat come home real quick

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  11. We haven't had a resident skunk, but when we first got our husky Marlene, she'd been sprayed a week before. We used a product called "skunk off" but the vet tech told us it could take up to 6 months for the smell to really go away. She was NOT kidding. We got Marlene in November 2015 and only stopped smelling skunk on her in the spring of 2016! Back when I was a kid our English Sheepdog got sprayed, poor thing. My parents tried tomato juice lol...didn't work, we had to have her shaved!!!

    You know, the last few days here have been really hot and sunny, I hope you get the same weather soon, I'd had more than enough of the wet cool summer! Your flowers are gorgeous!

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  12. Beautiful garden, I love all the liles in bloom right now. That crocosmia is pretty!!

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  13. Scooter is adorable! Your gardens are so lovely - I would love to purposefully plant flowers, but mine tend to get thrown into the nearest bed, without much thought of color combos.

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  14. Gorgeous!! Your gardens are on the same time line as mine here in upstate NY. I must transplant my tall cranesbill into the perennial bed, it's way too tall for where it is now. I would freak out if I had a skunk at my house because sure enough my pups would get sprayed!

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  15. Oh, man, Keep Scooter away! My only immediate experience with a skynk was when our Jack Russell trapped one under my aunt's old house the day before a new owner moved in. I don't know how many gallons of tomato juice and Bloody Mary mix my parents went through trying to eliminate the evidence. Unfortuanately, it wasn''t as easy to eliminate evidence from the house.

    If my typing is really bad sorry -- a black bar is coming up on all my blogger and web pages and I am literally typing blind.

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  16. Your garden is amazing. Those daylilies! So pretty. We've got lots of rain to spare, too, and I'm also happy to ship it off if someone wants it. In almost eight years of living in Kingston, I never ran across a skunk in the garden. We had tons of rabbits, though, and they ate everything in sight!

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  17. What gorgeous, gorgeous pictures of your gardens. You have a green thumb and it shows.
    We have had one of the rainiest seasons ever recorded here...so why do I have to water my pot daily? lol
    I know that skunks hate light so if they are out at night and you have motion sensor bright lights that will scare them away. I know my family used to use mothballs when I was a kid- spread along the foundation...but not sure you can do that anymore. They also say ammonia (set out in little containers) will drive them away. Good luck!
    Hope you have a blessed weekend. xo Diana

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  18. This may sound odd, but I've always wanted the experience that Skunk smell. It probably comes from reading too many comics as a boy!

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  19. Those Hydrangeas are amazing...
    Have a great week...
    Cheers!
    Linda :o)

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  20. We're having a lot of rain at home apparently. Yes I find cranesbill useful too. We trimmed the first bloom off just before we left as it had got straggly and the fresh was coming through.

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  21. Thanks for the walk around the yard, ajenn. You have some colorful blooms. We no longer have a yard or flowers, but this week we will be at our home in Virginia somit will be interesting to see how the yard flowers are doing or not. We also have many day lilies that volunteered as they can be quite invasive there.

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