It’s hummingbird season, which means it is also forest fire season. There are no fires around here, but to the northwest of us there is a sizeable fire which is putting a lot of smoke in the air. As soon as it rains, (hopefully today!!!) and/or the winds turn around from another direction other than the prevailing westerly flow, the sky will go back to the usual clear blue.
Everything is still nice and green but a few more weeks of no rain and high temperatures will not be a good combination.
We’re not getting a lot of solar gain today but we’ll gladly trade it for some raindrops. Way to the west there is a large mountain which is just barely visible through the haze.
Last night the deer got into the Bleeding Heart plant which lives next to our front door. Deer are messy eaters and have absolutely no sense of landscape appreciation, unless it has some salad dressing on it I suppose. The ferns are basically munched to the ground, and the delphinium isn’t going to make it, nor are the daylilies which appear to be the most favorite. And they are working on the Bleeding Heart, if you can call eating it and breaking off stems and leaves “working.” Over half the plant is gone now, and parts of it are strewn about the flower bed. Rats! Yeah, them too.
The deer are really making a mess of this garden area.
It’s quite the mess. To the right of the Bleeding heart is where the ferns were planted. There are some tiny fern leaves hugging the ground, so perhaps they’ll survive.
We'll need to find distasteful plants next year. I wonder if there is such a thing.
I was talking to my friend Anne yesterday and she said the deer had eaten her rhubarb plant to the ground, and that’s just shocking. I was thinking that if any plant would survive this predation it would be a rhubarb plant. But apparently not.
Gardening is going to be a challenge. I called around today and found some organic farmers in the vicinity, and strawberries will be ripe in quantity in 3 weeks. Woo hoo! Brandon is timing her visit just prefectly, I’d say.