Gracias por las gotas!

Blessed, blessed rains and the gray skies that brought them! We went right past spring and into summer, it seems, and the precipitation took a little while to catch up to the heat. But it has certainly made things interesting in the garden. The astors and the mint are threatening to fill in the spiral, and the squash, cucs, melon, and tomatoes have grown several inches in just a week. But, the worst of the worst news, we have army worms. Army worms decimated our tomato crop last year and made things very unpleasant to touch and look at. At the moment they're doing bad things to the English marigolds. We're investigating their destruction.

And today I went to the Growers Market at Lake Ella, and with the $20 that Janis donated to the garden for flowers, bought some really beautiful ones to plant among the sunflowers behind the hoop. I also bought lemon and cinnamon basil and orange and creeping thyme. I did manage to get them into the ground before those big late-afternoon raindrops sent me and Woody for cover (in Spanish, those big drops get their own word--gotas!). So we may stop by again before the end of the week to get the flowers planted up.

Gardening with wee ones

The sunflowers, which I've been planting two and three at a time as baby boy's capricious moods allow, are loving this heat. We planted a row behind the hoop and single flowers here and there throughout the main garden, and being out of the way, we tend to forget about them. But since they're so darn drought tolerant, they forgive us, and grow anyway. The heat has also made us brave enough to plant the summer squash, cantaloupe, and tomatoes (all in the crescent moon bed) and cucumbers (in the path bed behind the chard). In the shady spots on the east side of the garden, the parsley, onions, lettuce, kale, beets, and leeks are still growing, too, and we're hoping to get a few more weeks out of them.

The herbs are filling in fabulously -- sage takes up the whole wall bed and then into the paths some, same with the mint marigold. Bee balm, planted between the two, was just planted and is only about two inches tall, but she'll get there. Rosemary is growing well, and not too fast to interfere with the carrots growing in front of her. And wormwood and rue and comfrey couldn't be better.

And, thanks to Jan and her two baby girls, the fairies in the garden feel loved. That always helps things to grow beautifully!