HERE COMES THE SUN...AGAIN

I'm an early riser and if any gardening is to be done it had better be done early. I am no longer fooled by the perfect temperature at 6:30 am. It's going to be another day in the 90s. This morning we both agreed to skip breakfast, work outside for a few hours and enjoy a late morning brunch.

One of the first jobs of the day is checking for eggs on the squash. Today, there were more to remove but today was also the day I was to discover that at some point several eggs must have escaped my notice and had hatched. A small pile of telltale frass at the spot where they had entered the the stem. I took one of my coat hangers and wiggled it around in the hole. Hopefully this would put paid to the larva. So far his year has been my best year for squash.

The sun doesn't reach the front garden until around 12:00pm, so the day lilies are much later to begin their bloom cycle. These groupings have been in the garden for 8 years and would probably benefit from division. Maybe in the fall. They are such reliable and prolific bloomers that I hate to disturb them.

It certainly feels like mid summer but a few things are flowering now that should not be flowering until the fall. Here Eupatorium, fragrant mistflower, shrubby boneset. It is even in a shady location underneath a Texas persimmon.

Mums. I keep trying to get rid of these, pulling them out, but they always return from underground stems.

Mums and California poppies at the same time!

I think that this year is turning out to be one of the craziest garden years I have ever known. Missing from the scene this year are oakleaf rollers, harlequin bugs and leaf footed bugs. Not to mention hispid cotton rats. Instead we have little black beetles on the coreopsis- how dare they attack native plants, and hundreds of furry caterpillars who eat everything. If I thought they were the offspring of the red admirals who appeared in their hundreds a few weeks ago, I was wrong. There will be no fruit on the Meyer lemons which survived the winter, the sago palms will spend a year looking rather bare with only one rosette of new leaves, Mexican feather grass has gone to seed already. New rosettes of rose campion have germinated late but will likely not flower because it will get too hot- it is too hot.

Of course there are the faithful; squash vine borers, hornworms, the little beetles who frequent the purple skullcap; a nice crop of pomegranates; blue flax which has put on a magnificent show; winecups galore; hundreds of blackfoot daisy seedlings. Yes, that's gardening.