Monday Garden Club

Technically, I started writing this post on Monday but by now it's closer to Tuesday than Monday and my Internet connection is still working like shit, so it took approximately 4 hours (a majority of it watching the little spinny thing go around and around) to upload this week's garden photos.The weather here has been very summer-like for the past 2 weeks. In the 80s and humid almost every single day and seven-tenths of an inch of rain fell Wednesday night to water the garden so I didn't have to string together 4 hoses and stretch them out across the driveway and into my enormous garden. With that new rain of course brings the weeds and the first pass of the cultivator through the garden. The Gardener started small with the push cultivator but plans to go through it with the ATV mounted cultivator in a few days once the tiny seedlings get a little bigger and easier to see and hopefully easier to avoid.

So far every plant that went into the garden has survived and most of them (I would say) have already grown a little.
Almost all of the seeds have sprouted too. Here is a row of pole beans and sunflowers.
The idea is that the pole beans will use the support of the sunflowers to climb. We'll see how this works out...

The strawberries are starting to ripen! The Gardener ate the first one yesterday and the girls each found a red one today. Tomorrow I'm going to run out there first thing in the morning and check for red ones. My mouth is watering already!
I ended up moving the other strawberry plants and the other Topsy out to the new flower bed to get them out of my front yard. I also bit the bullet and bought 13 bags of mulch to spread around all of the flower plants. The weeds were getting to be too much to handle especially with the veggie garden being very close to needing a regular weekly weeding. The mulch should help keep the weeds down and besides it makes it look so much nicer and now that the plants stand out against the fresh mulch, I can tell which green thingies are flowers and which ones are weeds.
The peonies just opened up today and are as beautiful as ever. The girls each picked one this afternoon and wore the giant pink flowers in their hair until they got too heavy and floppy then they brought them in the house and put them in little opaque glass Remy Martin glasses vases to set on the kitchen counter.
The lupines are blooming wildly for the first time and I love it! Last year they bloomed but the flowers were small and not very impressive. This year is completely different and I'm so glad I started a bunch of these from seed and put them in the new flowerbed.

The hanging baskets are starting to bloom...
And while my mom was visiting this weekend she went through some of my houseplants, repotted them and set them out on the front porch to enjoy some of this warm weather.
As much as I love outdoor gardening, indoor plants just don't seem to be my thing. I forget to water them and basically neglect them. Hopefully these will do well outside and catch a few drops of water from the garden hose once in a while.

Now for all you gardeners out there who wish to participate, either leave a comment on what's growing in your yard, or post a Monday Garden Club update on your blog. Don't forget to drop your link in the comments and I'll add it to this post.

Participating Blogs:
Ma Vie Folle
Out In Them Sticks
Easy Eco To Go