Had another especially early morning today, thanks to the incessant itchiness. But the upside is that I was able to see a nice sunrise (rare for me) and gave the gardens a nice watering before the day's heat arrived.
The pink columbines are all coming into bloom now.
Since they have been the most prolific at setting seed, they are the ones who are colonizing all over the place.
I wonder what the result would be if I tried cross-pollinating it with the blue one up by the house. Hmmmm...
I made the trip out to Provincetown later on in the morning, for the doctor's appointment and then enjoyed a drive down Commercial Street, where the crowds are beginning to thicken with the holiday weekend's arrival. And of course, morning is delivery time along this narrow street.
This got me reminiscing about the year I lived in PTown. It was such a peaceful, sort of sleepy seaside village right up until Friday morning of Memorial Day.
Then suddenly, by that evening, there was a honky-tonk hubbub drifting through the window of my apartment that drew me out into the throngs on the street. Kinda cool.
A drive through the West End helped me get my lilac fix, since our plants are still entirely too small to bloom.
Here's another look at that blue columbine, now that you know my scheme for hybridizing. I wonder if it is as easy as I'm imagining...
On the way back up Cape, I treated myself to a visit to Bayberry Gardens in Truro. They always have a great array of plants, and often varieties of annuals that are a little off-beat compared to standard nursery offerings.
I chose a variety of tomato plants, some marigolds to go with them...and also a sixpack of picotee cosmos, which looked quite pretty on the tag, and some nemesia for the shadier beds by the house. Can't wait til they're all blooming!!
I stopped home on the way into work, to drop off the plants, and had a nice treat from inside the garden shed. Since I hadn't walked around the shed and down into the garden, I was able to see what the garden is like when I'm not there...and it was a hotbed of activity!
Robins and blue jays were poking around in the paths for worms and such, cowbirds cavorted in the apple tree, pigeons were splashing in the birdbaths, a catbird sang a surprisingly detailed tune and an oriole was gathering bits for a nest. Oh, what fun to see the habitat in action!!
It was, in fact, a hot day here, with a high temp in nearby Chatham of 91 degrees!! It wasn't especially humid, so it was actually kind of nice, for our first heat wave of the season...and I was glad I'd watered well early on.
After work, I got all the new things planted. Things were cooling off a little by then, though not too much (still 67 as I write this just before midnight). Definitely a nice evening for planting the tomatoes and nice to be back in the mood for gardening after so much time inside being itchy (Hydrocortisone cream is bringing new relief, and I've begun a course of prednisone, which should also be helpful in the next couple of days.).
One of the treats I allowed myself at Bayberry Gardens was something new for me. I'd always been interested in more natural methods of gardening, since pesticides can cause all sorts of troubles with the environment. So, when I saw that they were selling containers of Lady Bugs, I couldn't resist.
Not only are lady bugs pretty little things, but each one of them can eat 50 garden pests a day, including aphids, scale, mealy bugs and mites.
So, once the sun had dropped down in the west, and I'd watered all the new arrivals, I began to release these guys and gals into the various garden beds around our property. It was a pretty great deal: $6.96 for 1500 of them.
Interested to know what that many looks like? Well, the pic below probably represents about 1470 of them, since a bunch flew away when I opened the lid.
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