Azaleas and Herbs

Our azaleas along the east side of the house are blooming, the ones out front are not. I hope we don't miss them completely! We are going to Italy for the next 2 1/2 weeks, and I'm hoping to see some wonderful spring gardents while we are there.

We have a lot of sunflowers growing...we'll thin these out and move the biggest ones to the spots where we really want them to grow.



They've even reseeded along the edge of the sidewalk in front of the azaleas!



This azalea didn't do so well this winter. After it's done blooming we'll cut it back.



This is one of our Hardy Mums from last fall. I finally stopped being lazy and actually put four of them in the ground!



I potted up the herbs: parsley, basil, thyme and cilantro.





This strawberry crawled out of the strawberry pot last summer...



See you in a couple of weeks!

It's election day!

I'm putting up two posts today, so there is one new one below this one in case you didn't catch that. :-)

We've had frost, but I don't think we've had a hard freeze yet. This past weekend I finally did some work in the gardens. I cleaned things up, cut things back, and planted mums, asters and bulbs. Hopefully the mums and asters will make it through the winter to next year.



I added bulbs on the west, front side of the house to try and balance things out. Hopefully next Spring I'll have a shot of tulips, grape hyacinths and daffodils here!



Some things on the patio have not been hit by frost - one impatiens, a firecracker fuscia, and the eucalyptus.



The Japanese maple out back looks nice!



And this is that bush that has great little white flowers in the spring.



And the miscanthus looks pretty good, too! I should move these out from behind the Rose of Sharon.



The herbs are still doing okay, and it's going to be in the 60's the next few days, so I haven't done anything with them yet.



The Tabasco peppers were just ripening when it got cold, but we still got a few red ones! When Caleb and Ethan were here, Caleb ate one! He suffered for it, and ate another one two days later, the crazy kid.

It's August, where is the summer going?

Time is flying by... things in the garden are good, things are flowering, we are picking green beans, cukes, cherry tomatoes, zucchini and onions from the veggie garden. Here's a shot of Steve with the other winners of the Beacon Garden Contest. I'm so proud of him. He works so hard on our vegetables, he started 99% of them from seed, and has devoted a lot of love and attention to them, and they are delicious!



I love this! The Green Teens had these signs in front of their salsa booth this past weekend (follow the link to Flickr to see the full size photo if you can't read these):





These two Rose of Sharon planted themselves here a couple of years ago, but I'm going to need to take them out, because they are shading the hydrangea which is not doing so well this year.





Our mums are blooming, oops, a little early!



The white phlox is hidden behind the pink! Maybe I'll have to thin out the pink and move some of it this fall. I like the white.



One of the voodoo bulbs has sent up a second shoot!



We had a full rainbow the other day!