LysmachiaMoon's blog: Heavy rains; not much going on

Between excruciatingly high temperatures/high humidity (it was actually 83F here yesterday, but the "heat index" said it felt like 103F), and a hellish workload in the office, I did not get anything much done in the garden over the weekend. Pulled a few weeds here and there, picked some strawberries, black rasp., and snow peas. I think my regular peas will be ready to harvest later this week.

I was hoping to get outside early this morning and do something, but we had truly torrential downpours overnight and it's still raining a bit off and on now. May get some weeding done, but that will be about it. Glad to see that the cosmos, zinnias and calendulas I sowed just last week are already up and growing. The foxglove seeds that I cast about in the Fence Border with little hope (old seed) are it appears up and growing! When I think of how I tried so hard to start them in pots in the house over winter a couple years back....with no success... I think I am going to just start planting seeds the way Mother Nature does....toss them on the ground and see what happens. I was able to collect a little seed from my pink bleeding heart; the seed capsules burst and the seed happened to fall on the garden bench. I planted them directly, into the little "nursery" that I have near the Pond Circle.

A walk up into the Storybook Garden late yesterday afternoon....everything is booming along but lordy, lordy (or Boja, Boja as we of "Polish extraction" would say!), the weeds. I really need to get in that big bed and do some serious pulling and maybe some spraying. It's that damn Monster Grass....no matter how hard I try, it just keeps coming back. I dug up the top end of that whole enormous bed last year, carefully sorted out all the monster grass roots (I thought), amended the soil, etc.. Everything is doing well...but the grass is back as bad as ever. It's time to take chemical action. I'm going to try spot spraying it and hope against hope that it goes down into the roots and kills the stuff. It SEEMS to respond to Roundup...I sprayed a big area of it near the folly wall and that looks to be brown and dead dead dead...but it's like Dracula. Just when you think you have it down, it rises up again. *HA* I should call it Dracula Grass.

Not very pleased with the hens at the moment....I let them run loose for the past few days becuase of the heat...they have a big fenced in run with plenty of shade, but I still feel bad for them because there's no green grass in the run. Anyways....they were on a rampage yesterday....scratched my poor struggling primroses right out of the ground (I found them before they were wilted, so hopefully they'll recover), scratched a couple of the new Irish Moss plants out from under the Japanese maple....I don't even know how a hen managed to get in under there...and why? It's like they have this built in radar that homes in on whatever I've been working on and sets their pea brains to search and destroy. Argh. Well, it's rainy and cooler today, so the hens are shut up in their pen.
One trick I just devised to protect newly planted areas....I usually put some sort of wire basket (old dish draining racks work well) over the seed bed to keep the hens out, but the other day I did not have on so I laid three pieces of that bamboo that I hauled in last month over the bed. Just laid them out in parallel with only a little space between. Each stick of bamboo is very thick...maybe an inch or more in diameter...apparently the round slippery surface is not to hens' foot liking because they stayed off it. It looks better than wire baskets in the garden too...and the seeds (mostly calendula and marigold) are coming up just fine between the sticks.

Dreaming about my $7.2 million someday lottery winnings. That's the amount I'm bound and determined to win someday! I have it all figured how I'll spend it too! Hint: Buy some plants.

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