Sunflowers

During lockdown, Earl went to the market one day with express instructions to buy plants for our very small garden. We had heard that the plant seller would be there.

Earl put on his trusty mask and walked to the market.
Our outdoor market continued throughout the confinement, supplying fruits, vegetables, cheese and other necessities of life. We would take turns going because buying food in the outdoors seemed preferable to going into the grocery store. The town also took precautions, requiring people to wait at a distance in line and for the employees to pick up the fruits and vegetables as the customer directed them.
The plant seller had taken pre-orders. We didn't realize that, so took what was hadn't been claimed. Earl came home with six sunflower plants, along with a few daisy-type plants.

A selection of plants

I had purchased gladiola bulbs at the grocery.
Grace took charge of the garden, planting whatever we brought home.
As I looked at the plants, I regretted that we hadn't gotten some alpaca fertilizer from a friend in town. The soil in our garden looks a bit like concrete when it dries. I feared for our plants.
We don't have any mulch, although apparently you can get sawdust or chunks of wood from the local sawmill. 

Plants added, including wisteria along the metal brace

We bought some more plants once the local garden store opened. It had a strict policy of "you touch it you buy it" since we were still in lockdown. But overall, we were pleased with our purchases.
Next we had to protect the young plants from the snails.

I collected snails and deposited them across the road by the railroad tracks.
After awhile, we had very few snails in the garden. 

It wasn't long before the sunflowers in our garden began to take off. They grew and grew, climbing taller than the fence and even taller than Earl. 

Our sunflowers grew extraordinarily tall. You can also see the gladiolus blooming

Sunflowers in a field are usually about my height. You can see that in the picture of me from two summers ago.

The gargantuan size of our sunflowers soon gave way to speculation.
Could there be a body buried somewhere in our garden, was our first suspicion. After all, we only bought the house last August. We had no idea about its history.

The sunflower looms over Earl. 

As some friends joined us for dinner in the garden, Ray shared a story about some delicious grapes that a friend had planted and harvested. Extraordinary sized, juicy, and plentiful, he described the grapes. Then, the owner followed the roots and saw that the grapevine had infiltrated the sewage pipe, causing the vines to grow so bounteously.
We figured that sunflowers don't have roots as strong as grapevines so they probably weren't in our sewage pipe.

My hand next to the sunflower so you can see how thick the stalk is --
yes, like Jack in the Beanstalk. I could possible climb them. 

My friend Derrick has another theory. He figures the sunflowers had to grow taller to catch the sun.

A tree across the street sometimes blocks the sunlight, so he speculates that the sunflowers reached for the sky to get the most sun.
Whatever the reason, it's lovely to have a garden full of sunflowers that tower over everyone. We'll sprinkle seeds and see if they come back next year in full force.
But we won't go digging around for Jimmy Hoffa, just in case. 

Saturday Snapshot -- Summer Garden

Join West Metro Mommy for this weekly meme of photos people have taken and share on their blogs.

This week, we spent some time digging up two strips of grass in front of our stone wall and planting it with flowers.
I mostly considered this an unimportant job because I thought the grassy area was fine, but apparently it always bugged my husband. And truthfully, I didn't do very much.
I did go to the store to buy plants, manure and mulch, which subsequently spilled in my car and I'll need to vacuum it now.
After one side was planted, I realized we didn't buy enough flowers, so I went back to the store for more and spent one steamy afternoon digging holes to add the extra flowers. But my eldest son discovered me in the act and came to help.

He also dug up the grass on the other side so my husband could plant, manure and mulch there. So mostly, I'm a bystander in this project.
Even though I didn't think it was necessary, it does look nice.

The morning glories come back up each year around our porch. Usually I take a picture to show how they cover the railings, but I wanted you to see one up close. They look silky and velvety.

And each year, I buy a flat of zinnias to plant. I don't know why sometimes they look like this. One or two simple stems and flowers.

And other times, they outdo themselves, like these.

Hope your summer and your gardens are doing well too.
Hope you'll also visit French Village Diaries today where she posted a review of Paris Runaway, my latest novel. There's a giveaway too, so be sure to enter.

My Spring Garden

I just love all the beauty that spontaneously arrives in my front garden in the spring. 

Hyacinths. These bloom in a couple different colors in my garden. 

Pointy-petaled tulips

Here's a shot of the plants snuggled under their new black mulch thanks to my husband. 

And here's the other side of the garden with it's creeping phlox. 

I didn't get any close ups of the daffodils, but most of them have orange centers against pale yellow petals. 

Hope beauty is flourishing in your life, as well. 

Garden Secrets

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, has does your garden grow?
I've been thinking about my garden lately, but this rhyme reminds me of my friend Pat who auditioned for a fairytale theme park when she was a little girl and got the part of Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Her mother, who I can picture in low heels, a shirtwaist dress and a string of pearls, smirked a bit at the part she received.
Anyway, last year at this time, my flower garden at front was devoid of color, except for green and sometimes brown. Once the spring Irises and the June tiger lilies have faded, I had no color. I vowed that this year, July would have color.
I have a few spots of color, like my balloon flower

or my echinacia.

But they are sparse so far, not spreading in my garden. So this year, I planned ahead.I ordered some zinnias from the PTA plant sale, and my husband planted them along the front.
Zinnias are kind of flirtatious. They start to show a bud and they tease you that they will arrive soon.

And then you wait and wait for them to actually open.
Oh, but when they do.
They appear in shades of yellow, orange and red, and even purple.

They come in pink:

And even pinker:

They start out opening flat like a daisy then add layers and layers of petals until they are thick and lush.

Here's a photo from the back garden that shows a zinnia mingling with a pink hollyhock and some blooming purple hostas.
The hollyhocks come every other year and the soil around this house doesn't appear to nourish the hollyhocks that I've transplanted from my parents' house in Kentucky to Michigan to Ohio. The hostas are these hilarious little low growing shade plants that suddenly send a shoot straight up in the air, like a flag pole with purple hanging blooms.
But wait until I tell you about the surprise in my garden. I planted something that I forgot.
I'll tell you next time I'm feeling contrary.

Flourishing Plants

This summer, Earl cleared the garden in front of the garage and planted strawberry plants. Strawberry plants come back every year and they spread. They shouldn't be allowed to grow fruit their first year. Instead, Earl had to pull off any flowers so the plants would grow well.
After the first few weeks, a couple of volunteer plants stuck their heads through the soil in the strawberry patch. A tomato plant began to grow in the front corner away from the strawberries, so we left it. Then some sort of melon began to grow right in the middle of the strawberry bed. We love a good melon at my house, so we let it grow too.
We weren't too surprised about the volunteer plants since we had grown tomatoes and melons there the previous year.

Here's a picture of the leaves on the melon plant.
All of a sudden, the melon plant began to grow up instead of crawling along the ground. And then it sprouted this:

Something that was not a melon was definitely on its way.
And mid-morning, the plant would flower into a tiny yellow bloom with a reddish center.

It closed again before noon, so I was the only one in my family who ever saw it since everyone else slept most of the morning.
One morning, before the sun became ferocious, my neighbor Sandy joined me in the garden with a couple of wildflower books. We searched until we found the same bloom with the same leaf shapes. It was called "Flower of an Hour." Well, that made sense because it only bloomed for an hour. And it was a wildflower from "Eurasia." Truthfully, it was a weed.
Earl asked if he could pull it since it was a weed. I said no.
"Why?"
"Because it's pretty."
And in spite of its beautiful blooms, as it grew, it began to look weedier -- tall and rangy.
Finally, when Earl asked his weekly question about pulling the Flower of an Hour, I told him to do it.
Now our nobbly strawberry patch is without the gangly weed in the middle.
Here are a couple of actual flowers growing around our house. I'm not going to let Earl pull them. This is a Chinese bellflower, or a baloon flower, and I love it.

This is how it looks before it blooms, like a Chrysler symbol.
We also have a rose bush for the first time at this house. It has bloomed for nearly a month now.
I don't spend a lot of time on flowers. I usually plant some things in the spring and hope they continue through the summer. About this time of year, I run out of color in my garden. Before long though, the mums will begin to bloom and I can stop worrying about whether the neighbors are whispering about my garden or lack of it.