Transitioning to Summer

Diana Blueberry hybrid dianthus
5/31/11
     Our family is just back from 10 days of vacationing in our home state of Virginia.  How green it was!  How delightful it was to see rain and hear so many songbirds.  I miss all that now that we are living in the desert.  While gone, changes occurred in both my vegetable and flower gardens.

     As we move into the triple-digit heat of summer here, my vegetable garden is all but done.  The lettuces are gone, as well as the spinach, carrots and radishes.  I still have some red chard hanging on.  My one pepper plant never recovered from being wind burned.  It died while I was away.  I have 2 tomato plants left, but one is not looking good.  We've had 40 mile-per-hour winds for two days, which has damaged the plant beyond recovery, I fear.
White Wedding zinnia

     Out of the row of blue dianthus seeds I planted in the flower garden, one plant emerged and blossomed while I was away.  The white wedding zinnias bloomed while I was gone, as well as the hybrid mixed zinnias.  The pansies and petunias are almost all gone, and soon the strawflowers and gazania will die off in the daily triple-digit heat.  Next weekend I will buy the few summer flowering plants that can survive the heat and start digging them in.

Border
Beauty hybrid mixed zinnias
     As I took a walk around the yard a day after returning, I noticed that the orange tree had 7 small, green oranges on it, and the red grapefruit tree had 26 green grapefruit!  So it looks like we will have some citrus.  The lime tree had no fruit that I could find.  It sustained the most damage from the freezes this past winter, but all of its branches have new green leaves.


red grapefruit




3 comments:

  1. Thank you for visiting my blog and for leading me to yours. Reading your post has made me very grateful for the weather we have here in South India. There is no extreme weather, no winds. But we also experience very hot weather - it recently touched 40 deg C (104 deg F). I'm waiting to read your next post to know what you would plant in such weather.

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  2. Anita, thanks for visiting. I know your weather is very hot, but I believe you have humidity which we don't. It will be 105 tomorrow, but our humidity averages 2% to 8% in the summer here. I found your blog very interesting, and I will be checking back to read your blog again.

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  3. We also have the wind issue, but thankfully, not the heat. While I'm sure you loved being back in VA, I'm sure coming back to your garden was frustrating - finding so many things had gone hy.

    I so dread traveling because when I get back, my garden is rarely how I left it, although in my case, it's usually looking like Jurassic Park for the weeds!

    Some time ago, I found a wonderful catalog on line that had plants that were designed for xeriscaping. You might google it - I wish I'd saved a link but I didn't, but I bet you could track it down.

    Thanks for dropping by my blog and visiting my roses!

    Cathy

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