The Garden is Starting to Bloom!!

Today is day 7, the earliest day that the documents that I turned into the DOL should/could be processed. Of course, I have already headed over to the DOL website to check if my license has been released for reinstatement. It’s was only 6:30ish when I checked and there is still the hold on my license, but I’m thinking/hoping that just means it’s too early since the DOL isn’t even open, yet. I’ll check, again, later on. My fingers are so incredibly crossed that it almost hurts.

Yes, being home for so long, not by choice, is driving me a bit bananas. I’ve done everything that I am capable of doing at the moment with the gardens. Sure, I have a few more sunflowers I need to get into their own pots or to be planted somewhere, but I need more dirt and have not quite decided whether or not I really want to put them straight into the ground.

Some things are starting to bloom, which is super awesome! Lance’s Anaheim pepper

First bloom on Lance’s Anaheim Pepper plant

plant has one nice, large bloom on it with more buds preparing to open, and his raspberries are covered in buds and blooms. I have a number of my Bachelor Buttons blooming, one of my Painted Daisies that I planted last year, which did nothing, is about to bloom with a few others not too far behind it. The Allium is finally in full bloom, their purple globes

Allium

quite beautiful despite their leaves indicating they are less than happy with the soil they are planted in. Maybe I’ll move them at the end of the season. My three Columbine that survived last year’s heat, though didn’t bloom, are elegantly gorgeous, and each one is a different color: yellow, pink with an antique white middle, and purple.

Columbine

My feverfew is getting quite large and has just started throwing out some little white blooms, and one of my Echinacea plants has a nice healthy bud on it already. To say this pleases me doesn’t begin to cover it.

My pumpkins are doing quite well, at least double in size from when I transplanted them, but there is something going on with a couple of them that I need to figure out. One pumpkin plant was very wilted, yesterday, despite having had adequate water. Another one is turning yellow even though its stature is that of a very healthy plant. I’ll be heading over to a bunch of the gardening websites later today to see if I can decipher whats going on there.

The vegetable garden is doing great! I lost one broccoli plant, but one out of 5 or 6 isn’t bad, especially since the others are looking like they are doing very well. The corn has grown to about 5 inches tall and this, of course, makes me smile. I had a couple come up as two but I was able to separate them and transplant the extras successfully. I had no idea if one could actually successfully transplant corn in this way but apparently you can. YAY!

My rose bushes are doing very well, also. The only thing going on with them that I need to figure out is that one has aphids and the other does not. Odd. I’ll figure it out. They both have little buds on them, though, and I’m excited to see them in bloom. These are my first rose bushes of my own, which just adds to the excitement.

The squirrel nabbed another sunflower, yesterday. I guess I didn’t have enough marigolds around them. I had extra marigolds, another 12 of them, still in their starter cells they came in, so I grabbed them and set them around the sunflowers the squirrel is hitting up the most. This brazen squirrel sat fairly low in the tree while I was doing this, so I had a little chat with it. I let it know that it needed to stop eating my plants, that I had been super happy it had shown up but now I just want it to go away because it is killing all of my sunflowers, and to knock it off. I didn’t lose any more sunflowers after that so either the talking to or the addition of more marigolds seems to have worked so far. I’m guessing it was the marigolds, though the little girl in me wants to believe it was the talking to. Yeah, Cinderella I am not. Or Snow White. 😉