July 2017

It has been a long time since I have made the time to post to my blog.  There has been lots of renovations going on in my garden this year.  The top photo is some of the improvement to the time circle earlier.  The thyme was in bloom and is starting to fill in the bald spots.  It is a photo taken with my phone.  That is a pretty good little camera.   The bottom photo is from August 1st of the simplicity rose with the jackamani clematis in the back ground.   I rather liked how it turned out.

I have a few milkweed  speciosa plants in pots that might make it through the winter.  I got the seed from a place in Oregon.  I have the butterfly weed - tuberosa, blooming in the cutting garden.  There is another one from the seed from Dave  that is in bloom and appears to be  the same color bloom as the tuberosa.  It is in a pot, too.  And there are 2 swamp milkweed in pots that I got from Cannor last Fall in pots.  They are not in bloom yet.  So, the milkweed project is slowly coming along.   There are times when I could use my Mom's green thumb.    I have some fennel in a pot.  One bronze and another is a seeding from the green fennel.  I have a huge swallow tail as a regular visitor and an admiral.  Although I cannot seem to catch them sitting still.

The david fell over and now has a wooden shim to set it upright and level.  This shim needs pot shards or little flat stones to replace the wood some day.  I have dug the roots out from around the david and surrounded the platform stone with some plastic edging material.  Then filled this circle of edging with sand and more clean clay.  I am in the process of removing the michaelmas daisies from everywhere in the garden.  They are far too invasive.  I removed them from the fig tree bed and mowed them off the  garden bed under the holly tree.  The holly tree has had some lower branches removed.

About 3 weeks ago Davey Tree people came over and trimmed back the cedars on the Pees side and cut back the camillia.  They topped and sheared the sides of the hedge along the west side.  There are now Syrians  renting the house on the other side of this hedge.  They now have chickens.  :)  I think I will give them my egg cartons.  Dan, of Davey Tree and his helper did an excellent job of all of this.  He also took off a couple more lower branches of the sweet gum tree, and pruned back a couple more that were headed towards the house.  Since that time I have been watering and watering.  We are having some very high temperatures right now, so I do have to keep at it.  The hedges  and all the garden seem to be doing ok with all this watering.

In March I was notified by Go Daddy that I had to get the malware off my website or they were going to shut down and site.  Google was already complaining about this malware.  I had received an earlier notification from Godaddy about this but my name was not on their information and so I thought it was a scam and deleted it.  After a talk with Adam from Hosting, he set me up with sitelock to keep my site clean.  I am paid up with it for 3 years.  As soon as I can afford it I will be getting an SSL again.  Maybe in January.  I have been reloading my site photo albums and all pages with the Godaddy FTP.  Its a pain and I really must find the time to learn to use a new FTP.  I can contact Adam for both of these items and he will help me with them.  I am almost up to where I had been with my photo albums.  I have decided to redo some of the Gardening ones, and have only 3 left to reload of the Travel previously completed albums.  I have also made some more pages to add garden journal notes , annually and travel journal notes for all the trips noted in my journals.  Considering how much I have managed to get done since March, I think I will be able to get more done by year end.  I am not participating in any on line photo upload sites, and paying the bare minimum to my other on line sites.   AND to my blog.   I hope to get back to doing a few more regular posts by the end of the year, also.