Home Again, Home Again

One of the nice things about being back home is seeing the changes that have occurred on the old homestead in a week's time.   

The perennial garden is in great shape. When we designed this ten years ago, I was impressed with pictures of English cottage gardens. The lack of defined ares in the garden was very appealing to me. Now I know that a professional gardener would say we don't have a cottage garden, but I was mostly interested in having a jumble of flowers of different looks and textures pushing up against each other. We have a few thin areas to work on this fall, but it looks very nice in July:    

Pretty much all the flowers in our garden are standard Illinois perennials. We were looking for flowers that were hardy in Illinois summers and could tolerate the winters. We ended up with about 25 different varieties altogether.  A really good source if you are looking to plant perennials around here is Perennials for Illinois by William Aldritch.    

 

The Russian Sage on this end has been beaten down by the storms from the weekend, but it looks like it is beginning to recover. Next to them are coneflowers and daylilies. The orange flowers are butterfly bushes.   

Daylilies and spiked gayfeather in this section. On the left edge of this picture are the monk's hood flowers that bloom a deep purple in late September and October when everybody else is done.    

The little yellow flowers are coreopsis, which I love until you have to cut them back, one at a time, all 400 of them.   

The statue in the center of the garden was a gift for Ann from her colleagues when she retired in May. It looks nice there.  If you click on the picture, you can see it a little better.   

The Hosta garden is obviously doing well. Ann is trimming the balloon flowers and the phlox in the back from across the fence. The bird bath gets a little action in the spring and fall. The neighbor is in charge of feeding the birds.   

New for this spring is a raised vegetable bed. We missed having fresh produce after we stopped growing vegetables 15 years ago. We had a run of three years in a row of poor results and gave up. So I built a 6 foot by 12 foot bed out of 2 by 8 cedar and filled it with a gazillion bags of soil. Unfortunately we got a little carried away planting and we're having territorial issues.    

First, squash takes a lot of room. More room than we remembered. And we probably planted the tomato plants too close. So they are slugging it out and there's not much we can do at this point. We have squash just about ready so it's time to fire up the grill and break out the olive oil.    

 

The tomatoes along the back (1 Roma, 3 regular, and 1 grape) are crowding out the peppers that are in front of them, so Ann dug out two peppers today and moved them to open space.   

 

We should have a few more tomatoes soon. We have gotten two Early Girl tomatoes so far. We eat them like apples while we are standing out by the garden. It's the Ohio way. Although I may have to put a permanent salt shaker out there. They are better with a little salt.   

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes - Aaaaaaah!   

The open spot is not really open. There are onion plants in there that don't seem to be doing much of anything. That's OK. I'm not too big on onions unless they are breaded and deep fried, but we figured to use them cut up when we are cooking or put them on Dave's hamburgers as we grill them. Those are bush beans in front. Slow cook them with bacon and they are mighty tasty.   

So that's the tour of the backyard flora at the Armstrong back 40 (I would have done fauna, but it's still a few weeks before we get the new dog).  It may only be a quarter of an acre, but we use the space wisely. We'll send you a tomato in the mail when they are ready.