This has been an especially hot early summer. Usually, I don’t do well in the heat, but it’s also been quite rainy, with storms pushing through and leaving sunny and clear, breezy days. Glorious, really. Perfect garden weather. Except for the peas. I ate my first snap peas yesterday. Delicious, but there won’t be many of them. Peas need a cool spring in order to produce.
Lettuce is also a cool-weather crop. This is the last of my spring planting. I’ve sown a variety that is supposed to tolerate summer’s heat. It’s not up yet, but I’m hopeful I’ll be able to have lettuce until the first frost. One never knows.
The zucchini love the heat and the rain. I think there will be a bumper crop. I’ll be freezing vegetable stew to eat this winter.
Flowers are in full-bloom. This is the clematis decorating the vegetable garden’s fence.
The hydrangeas have done especially well this year. Although the blue hydrangea’s blooms aren’t as large as usual, it’s making up for it with quantity.
I love the colors of this one. It turns from lime green to pink.
But my favorites are the naturalized oak leaf hydrangeas. They’re the perfect plant for a woodland border.
The goats have been eyeing them. Pip tells me that they need pruning.
I tell him that the hydrangeas are not on his menu, but that he can browse on the black raspberries after the harvest.
I’m hoping he’ll wait.
Your blue hydrangeas are beautiful! I love that color!
I’ve painted beadboard in a bathroom that color. Lovely!
My garden isn’t doing so well. The heat is bad enough. We were one degree from 100 yesterday, but we haven’t had much rain. I stood out in the garden for an hour the other day with the hose, hoping against hope for my squash and tomatoes.
~Randy
I can’t function when it gets above 90. 100 sounds brutal. I hear artichokes do well in that weather! :)
This must be what makes gadening so “fun”! We have been so cool and wet this spring that we are now drwoning in peas and greens, but our squash, cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes are wondering when the sun is going to show up…I like the challenge, and the hens like the excess peas and greens!
Dreadfully hot here too in the south-east of England but I suppose we have it easy, really – my husband’s colleague who hails from Baghdad said it would regularly reach 50 degrees (which I see is 122 F) there and all you could do was sit in a cafe drinking mint tea and longing for the night when it may or may not drop a dozen degrees or so! What on earth do they do for veg over there?