Photo thread two. It's peak season, share your pictures:

Yellow tiger lilies. They have a lot more buds and flowers than last year, their first.

Florae I had to take the 'Ashleaf' out of my garden. It took over. I have replanted it in the area that the deer eat and they seem to like it and keep it chewed down to tolerable levels. I have to say I loved the plant until it started taking over.

Geez, glorious pictures.
I haven’t had much time for computers when the sun is so invitingly shining, but I figured I had at least look at this thread.

(Steve: You could have expected any sculptor who knew what he was doing to use a variety of chisels and mallets/hammers. They would start with the biggest and work their way down until they were using tiny things. The business ends of the chisels have a variety of flavours. Grain in marble is not as fussy as grains in wood to the carver. Perpendicular blows are now quite as tedious as ones that might follow the “grain” and find a weak spot. But the grand carvers of old were probably pretty darn good at sonding out such problems before they got there: by tapping a chisel and listening to the sound of the stone. I admire stone sculptors and feel quite humbled watching the way the work, but I’m stuck on pottery and dream about glazes at night!)

Katye: Glad ‘Chantal’ is breathtaking. You grow everything so well.

MtnMama- your garden is great! I love the cottage garden look of plants all shoulder-to-shoulder. They look like they are just so happy to be there. And thanks for the info on Cherry bells.

Donna- I wish I could solve your Guinea hen problem and adopt a handful of them!

That red pea is great, Florae. The only varieties that grow down here in the hot summers are the perennials (pale, unfragrant, and therefore not totally worth growing) and one called ‘Matucana’ which is making its start in my garden.

Paja, how is that Banana?

Zantedeschia ‘Mango.’ These poor things just don’t like the heat.

Asclepias physocarpa looking all robust and youthful. I do hope it blooms before the year is out.

Kenton - are the scissors a means of communicating "bloom, or else!" ?

By the way - Matucana is extremely fragrant & it ought to do well for you: it grows in the deepest gravel pathways for me.

Lily 'Muscadet' - with rosa 'the fairy'

Henryii

Rehmannia, Physostegia, Helichtotrichon, Euph. Tasmanian Tiger, White Hydrangea, Lysimachia ephemerum. Not the best picture due to impending rain.

Conca d'or - very bright & very fragrant.

Stunning Katye! You have many beautiful and exotic plants!

Asclepias physocarpa -- a.k.a. Great Hairy Balls plant http://www.anniesannuals.com/signs/a/asclepias_physocarpa.htm

Once again, Kenton hits the innuendo jackpot!

Sofer.. You're so right about the Ash Leaf. I keep only that small bunch and cut the runners every week or so. So far, so good. But if it gets to be a problem, it will be pulled out. My husband always said I changed my plants more than I did my wardrobe. LOL!

In fact, today I pulled out my raspberry canes and will replant that bed with more strawberries next spring. I messed around with the raspberries for about 5 years and never seemed to get a good crop.. so it was time to get rid of them.

It's a good thing I have a small lot.. keeps me under control when I see all the beautiful flowers everyone has posted.

Not exactly "pretty", but I just came in out of the rain where I was checking out my rain diversion experiments -- in a dounpour!

The rain diversion project some of you saw in May is working fine, and we have plans to expand it this fall

This is a comparable area (same slope, similar input from runoff) that has not yet been diverted into a raingarden

This is a direct capture system I am using for the downhill side of my own building, for the "purple border". We can't use rain storage barrels here, so I have been tinkering with using a deep infiltration trench 5' from the foundation (downhill) with a raised bed built over it. This picture shows the reservoir full but not overflowing after > 10 mins of very hard rain.

I can't wait to see all this in the fall. I have downspouts where I could possibly do the same thing. I have the runoff, but I am not sure there is anywhere I could build much of a deep entrenchment trench. How deep is deep?
I get the rain diversion project though.

"deep" is a factor of how much area is creating the runoff. The last picture is of an experimental bed that should only take in the water from that one spout. We have other areas where up to 3000 sf of impermeable surface drains to a single point. In a storm like we had this evening (1" in 30 mins) that means several THOUSAND gallons of water pouring down the hill that is currently just lawn. The lawn will absorb some of it, but the faster it comes down the more runs off because the impermeability of a lawn on clay soil is 85% that of asphalt.

To capture the runoff from the 3000 sf area, we will have a trench 3' deep and 20' long, backfilled with 1' of large gravel & 2' of compost planting material. Then we have to cover it out with the right sort of plants. The trench in my experiment above is only 1' deep, and filled with fine gravel & a raised bed on top that acts like a sponge. Obviously you would NEVER attempt this on the uphill side of the foundation -- everything must eventually run away from the foundation or directly into the soil.

This is one reason why everyone should take algebra! At least you should be able to calculate the runoff from your own roof.

Anyone who was at the spring meet was absolutely in awe of this tremendously brilliant project of GJ's. I must disagree, though, GJ, I think the first picture is pretty.
Thanks for the pictures of this thing in motion.
it gets me thinking about the spot where the roof drains onto my garden.

The area of my roof is huge. The area of my yard is not all that much bigger than the house. This house is on too small a lot for its size. I thought of trying to dig such a trench -- I heard about this from the county agent. First I will have to do a rather extensive guttering job, though. It may turn out that rain barrels will work better for me given the physical barriers on the property. It gives me pause to think about what would happen if we had a truly huge rain with so much water running off the roof and blocked from going anywhere -- by garden walls. Probably I need to put some drain age holes in my garden walls
We had 2 inches or rain in 1 hour last summer. The neighbors across the street had built a beautiful patio made of some kind of rock that was a couple of inches thick. To make a long story short, the patio was on top of sand they had laid down, but unbeknownst to them they had intensive gopher burrowing under their patio. The patio apparently had a bit of a lip around it, enough that quite a bit of water remained on the patio during the downpour. Before long it soaked into the gopher tunnels, then started spurting up like a geyser in a different part of the yard. Then the entire patio collapsed quite a ways down.
Water can be a powerful force!

Despite the sad detriment it caused to the homeowner, I am finding the image of all that quite comical...
Beware!: Gopher Geysers!

would that we had rain... but thank goodness we don't have gophers! And the chipmonks have learned to stay away from the dog patrol. So other than Dogs digging near the house, no borrowing animals at the moment! Whew!

Yes it kind of reminds me of that Bill Murry movie with the golf course. Boom! Boom! You people in the desert are lucky to have to worry about rain problems. We live on a hill and it all runs off when ever it rains.

I thought it was really funny too. Actually even the neighbors it happened to thought it was funny. It sure does tell you a lot about what gophers can do! They had a small French poodle in the patio, who annoyed the gophers when they came up before the patio was built, but once the patio was built, they though all was well. It was a lot of work, but they were able to rebuild the patio with the same stone.
I have long thought it was good to destroy large gopher tunnels when I find them, even though experts tell you it won't kill the gophers. At least it slows them down a bit.
And yes it was like Caddy Shack, best gopher movie ever made. And don't forget, most of the guys around here are involved one way or another in building nukes. It may be that gophers are a bigger threat to our internal security than terrorists! Those cute little fuzzy guys can drive one to...... hmmm.

Here is hydrangea Endless Summer. I bought it this spring by mail order and it arrived with lots of roots but looking totally dead. Almost no green showing. I planted it and babied it with extra water and coffee grounds and here it is now. It is about 1 ft. tall and 14 inches wide and is blooming.
I am very pleased that it is doing anything, but apparently the people on the hydrangea forum, at least some of them, thing Endless Summer is a disappointment nation wide.
I was thrilled that it bloomed because I planted a hydrangea Penny Mac last year when I first heard they could grow here. It is about 2 feet tall and is growing nicely, but no flowers yet. I understand they need at least a little sun. That may explain my Penny Mac problem. It is in almost total shade right next to musa basjoo as a matter of fact.
Anyhow, Endless Summer has yet to pass a winter here -- which could be telling, but it is a success so far.
Thanks to all of you for telling me that some hydrangeas grow here.

Oooo, and blue, too. Tempting.

paja, congratulations on babying your Hyd, Endless summer successfully. I bought one either last year of before, anyway I wasn't successful with it. In fact I have 3 or 4 hydrangeas and none are blooming.

The weather is still hot here in the 90s, but thankgoodness the nights are cool. I am really enjoying my tomatoes and even have enough so that i was able to give some to friends.

Donna

My daughter isn't much into gardening, but she is very into fresh food and cooking. I am very much into the gardening and into the eating of fresh food and good cooking. These tasty morsels all came from my garden and have been turned into 3 quarts of lovely pasta sauce by my DD. Dogs have devistated the early tomatoes in my garden, so the 10 lbs of fresh tomatoes came from the farmers market - but at least they were vine ripe and local, even if local was a bit further than the back yard. We bought nearly all the paste tomatoes from one small producer. They were happy - we were happy! Hope they are back next week! Yum!