The Green Egg

It's Sunday, so how about some pretty flowers now?

I was supposed to have posted this months ago, back when everything was just sprouting and the garden looked like this:

I kinda went nuts with the mail-order bulb place, springhillnursery.com, and in the seed section at Lowe's.  And the grocery store.  Anywhere, really, that sold the promise of green, yellow, red, pink, and beauty.

 We planted ranunculus in this pot and got giddy when they sprouted.  Unfortunately, due to the chipmunk's vigorous dirt baths, they were all smothered in their infancy.  We got not a single bloom.

I planted columbine seeds (the pinks on the upper right), but they never sprouted, as far as I could tell.  Our tulips came up beautifully (top left and bottom right), but a late freeze erm, froze them out, and they never flowered.  The morning glories (bottom left) actually did come up!  But only the darker ones, and only a few of those.  The maple seeds the chipmunk planted, however, sprouted up in the planter in great profusion.  It's a shame we couldn't tell what they were from the beginning...I'm thinking they must have choked out my poor annuals.

We planted some gorgeous roses in the front bed:

Dave picked the incredible peach one, and I picked the sweet little whites.  The dead one used to be red. It also used to be alive.  It used to be pretty.  It's dead and gone, now, though.

One of our favorites of this season,

...our begonia pot.  I told you here about how the yellow ones in the center all bloomed beneath each others' leaves, the shy things...but the fabulous orange ones (bottom), seemed to be trying to make a break for it and escape the pot.

I ooed and awed over these fabulous blooms for months before they started to fade.  I know I have more (and better) pictures of the entire pot, but I can't seem to find them.

And these late-comers Dave was a huge trooper to plant all by himself:

 (The wire is to keep them from being dug up by, we believe, a nasty raccoon.)

 All but one succeeded and thrived, even this late in the season.

We got mostly yellows in our grab bag, but one was pink, and we got this one brilliant orange one:

We didn't go as wild on the edible plants, knowing we have little herbivores wandering the property and not wanting the frustration of having all our produce eaten by foragers, but David did buy a few pepper plants.

 We started out with a lot more than just the three pepper plants that ended up producing, but the wicked raccoon dug them up and killed them.

These grow wild around the property:

The bottom ones are tiny snap dragons!  Aren't they cute??  The flowers are about the size of my thumbnail.

You know what else is wild around our property?  Wild animals:

Poor possum.  We were trying to catch coons, not possums.  So Dave carried him over near cover and he ran off, seemingly none the worse for his ordeal.

We had woodpeckers earlier in the season.

 And I caught this leaf bug watching me paint those magnet boards the other day.

This is a kildeer:

Ahem, a baby kildeer.  See it's nubby little wings?  This little family came running past the window down the driveway, cheep-cheep-cheeping, and a few minutes later came running past again...running laps around the house, apparently.  They build their nests on the ground, so when the babies hatch, they all go for nice little family runs before they're able to fly. If a threat happens to come too close (like our poor chipmunk), the mom will either attack the threat (if it's small, like a chipmunk), or will feign a broken wing and lure the predator away from the babies.  And their call is pretty, too.  We have them in Ohio and down here on the Gulf coast, too, so I guess they're pretty wide-spread.

And of course, no discussion of the Mudlake Yard is complete without mention of the groundhog:

...who is not so afraid of us as he used to be.  He allowed me within 20 feet of him for this photo, phenomenally close, I felt.  And then he never actually hid, though he got ready to, as you can see.  He just sat by his house (the shed) and watched me walk away.

Over by the lake,

 I had a little more Photoshop fun, trying to enhance a dark sky without losing the green of the grass.  That reflection in the lake was pretty darn tricky.

Not terribly successful, but a valiant effort, I thought.  I have a terrific book for beginners, but...I haven't read it yet.  I need to transfer it to my Kindle, I think.

It's another beautiful day down here...I hope you're having a great day!

P.S. I forgot this photo that I randomly exported to the wrong folder! 

This is unfortunately the only bloom we got from our 8 dahlias (grrr, raccoon!), and then we discovered that you have to dig up and replant dahlias every year if you want them to bloom more than once.  Gaaa!