July - afternoon storms and green!

So, we're 1/2 through July and in the middle of a hot, fairly dry summer. Thankfully, our garden and flowers are doing 10,000 times better than our lawn. Honestly, when it's 90+ degrees for 30+ days in a row, fescue is toast and wasting hundreds of dollars on watering it seems silly.

This summer Paul and I got creative with the garden. Ok, it was mostly Paul, I'm there for support (he's an engineer which shows in his calculated plans whereas I'm more attuned to how pretty it looks). Anyway, after last season's fight with crabgrass and other weeds in the garden and its near impossibility in keeping it watered just right, he came up with a 2 part plan.

First we covered the entire garden with awesome landscape fabric. This made planting seed pretty impossible so we bought all our plants in pots from various places (Lowe's, Home Depot, local herb festival). Next year I hope to start some seed indoors and transplant... hmmm, that requires some advanced planning, effort and timing. We'll see. So, the garden was covered in lovely black fabric, the veggies and herbs planted. It's so nice & neat - weeds be gone! (and no more kittie poo surprises, ewwww!)

Next, we looked into irrigation. Paul invested a decent amount of time checking out the 'homeowner installed' irrigation options at our aforementioned local home improvement stores. I'm partial to Lowe's and thankfully that's where we found "Mister Landscaper" neatly organized on the shelves. Amazingly, it wasn't a huge investment and was really easy to use (no engineering degree required!). It took less than a hour to run the lines and start playing with all the configurations which resulted in us getting throughly wet (which was quite nice as day was exceptionally hot).

Both well laid plans have paid off! We've got more tomatoes than we can eat (no duh as we have 8 plants in several varieties). The peppers, squash, watermelon and cantaloupes are coming along beautifully (we've got blooms at least!). We're virtually weed-free, well watered and easy to maintain. It's amazing!

Check out all the green:

Squash blooms


Cantaloupe blooms


Sweet banana peppers (you can see one of the "Mister Landscaper" sprinklers in the lower right)


Cute little tasty tomatoes ("sweet 100s")


Basil (gotta have it with all those tomatoes!)


Not in the garden - but in the backyard...

Key Lime tree has made an awesome come back! Look at it's blooms - woo!


Bunch of roses (survivors of the Japanese beetles)


"Rose of Sharon" bloom


Gladiolas - last of the amazing blooms, but still beautiful


And my first attempt at growing Cana flowers. More than 1/2 didn't come up, but 3 did and have bloomed quite nicely)



Oh yeah, the title of this post includes "afternoon storms," of which we've had very few. Last week's rain dumping storm made up for about 2 weeks worth of rain in about 2 hours. We got between 1 and a quarter to 1 and a half inches of rain.

Hey look! We've got our own pond! Although honestly, it's just a tad bit too close to the house. (also note the 'swaying' willow tree in the back, windy? yeah.)


Water flowing under the bridge (thankfully, not OVER)


Hello waterfall from the upper neighbor's backyard (good bye mulch)


At least the elephant ears look happy (see water still flowing through the retaining wall, nice)


Bye, bye rain! Please come back soon!