It's a new month and lots has been accomplished. I also have a free app that I'm enjoying right now, and if you are a bird lover/enthusiast, you will love it, too.
As you may know, we are working on the property to ready it for next years (on this very date in fact) wedding of our daughter. It is very important now to look around the perennial borders and see what is in bloom, as I want to be sure to promote that for next year.
Most of my jobs involve gardening, or should I say revamping existing beds and borders. Here is one that I literally dug 80% of the plant material out of it because it was overgrown, weed infested, and needing purposeful planning. Here it is after much work.
The perennial I gleefully dug up and tossed behind the chicken coop was Rudbekia (black eyed Susan). I have fought that flower mightily over the years. It has the ability to self-seed like no other.
Now this bed has two cedars, two spireas (which were already there, but I moved one), three daylilies, two butterfly bushes, three hydrangeas (little lime, and little lime punch), one wiegela red prince, a handful of stella d'oro daylilies and one potentilla (yellow). I just need to lay down weed barrier and mulch it. I'm still deciding where to purchase mulch. The cost of plants and landscaping materials has almost doubled over the years. I usually just divide what I already have, rather than buying new, but I wanted this bed to be really nice and balanced for next August. The daylilies, butterfly bushes, hydrangea and potentilla will all be blooming at the time of the wedding.
Prior to this I also worked on a very long bed that borders our property and has a rail fence behind it. It too, was extremely over grown, mostly with grass and the dreaded bindweed which is impossible to eradicate. I spent days and days and days digging up each section, dumping, covering with weed barrier and mulching. That particular mulch was the result of an arborist who came in late spring to do some work for us and he wood chipped some large branches that were taken down. This bed is a mish-mash of shrubs and some perennials. I added cedars and some divisions of plants I already had and it will be good for next year.
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The flat lawn area in the foreground is where the large wedding tent will be set up for the meal and the dancing later in the evening. Husband has been putting the lawn roller on the back of the lawn mower every time he mows to make sure things are as smooth as possible and will do that next summer as well. We have a "country lawn", meaning it's green and we mow it but it's not all perfect grass. We don't hire a company to spray, seed, and fertilize. Everything we do is done inexpensively and usually just by us.
My gardening continues and my vegetable garden is doing very well. We've had such lovely heat and the beans have exploded. Yesterday I blanched and froze quite a lot of green and yellow beans for future meals. Also in my vegetable garden is something that makes me ridiculously happy. I planted zinnias and cosmos for the first time and I can't believe the zinnias! They are so bright and cheerful and are such amazing cut flowers. I'm sure the pictures on the blog won't do them justice, but here are some...
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I always have a little vase of them in the house somewhere. The cosmos have not started blooming yet, but I'm looking forward to them.
Lastly, my sister told me about an app for your phone that identifies bird sounds. It is called Merlin (through the Cornell Lab) and it is amazing and somewhat addictive. It is free to install and then all you do is hold your phone and let it listen to the bird sounds wherever you are. It identifies the bird and gives you a little information about it and you can listen to recordings of the bird's different sounds it prove to yourself that it is indeed, that bird. You can make a "life list" of the birds you have heard. Here are a couple of screen shots of birds that I have heard.
My daughter now has the app, too. She's the one who showed me how to make the life list. If you enjoy backyard birds at all, I encourage you to try this out. (I get no money from promoting this at all, it's not a sell job, I just really like it). If a bird name is highlighted in yellow, that means that bird was being heard at that time.
Happy August to you all, those who are still kicking around in blog land. I always think of August as the last hoorah of summer and associate it with vegetable garden harvest and the sound of crickets!
