Catching up with Weeds

This past week or so has been taken up with finishing up the school year, finishing up grad course work and trying to play catchup with the weeds. It's a never-ending battle to keep the weeds down, corral the beautiful but invasive plants, like evening primrose and to maintain the paths so I can actually walk around a bit.  Oh... and the strawberries need picking every other day. I started to cull out the lupines that were taking over the world, digging and composting and cutting spent blooms off as well as trying to get rid of pink musk mallow- lovely, invasive with a tap root.

 So... tonight I decided to go through the folder on my desktop and curate the piles of photos from the week.  I cut it down to ~ 70. Needless to say,  I take too many pictures and like too many of them.  Later on in the season, when I try to choose a half dozen or so to put on canvas, I'll have to get serious about curation as it's way too expensive to get too many produced.

What has impressed me this week, aside from the prodigious amount of work I did- check out the paths below... were both the poppies and the peonies.

Adding straw mulch to strawberries

Adding bark mulch to paths

Weeding and more weeding!

I have added a few new types of poppies over the last year and they have really begun to put on a nice show- from the Icelandic poppy to the Oriental poppy to the California poppy- they are all flowering this year.

Here are a few from this past week: Beautiful colors!

The other plant that has had a spectacular year are the peonies. The intersectional peonies are amazing. I wasn't crazy about the variety Julia Rose at first, but then really enjoyed watching it change color every day.  A new one for me, planted last year,  is Callie's Memory.  This is a relatively small Itoh, at least compared to the Bartzella, but the flowers are beautiful and like the Julia Rose, change hue every day.

Julia Rose

Julia Rose

Callie's Memory

Callie's Memory

Callie's Memory

This Week's Photos