Back in the Garden

 Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you.

     Thursday night we had rain and thunderstorms, and luckily that heat dome lifted. Now we are back to normal summer weather where it's warm and humid but not oppressive. Friday I went out and checked my gardens, which did need some weeding, but not enough that I couldn't take a few minutes and pull one or two. I am sure if I wanted to do some major weeding I could find some renegade plants to pull, but instead I'd rather enjoy the flowers.  ❤

     I thought I would share some more of my garden views since I'm very happy with how most everything looks right now.

     I'm not sure what variety of Spirea this is, but the one plant I bought has seeded itself a million times around my yard. I've pulled out a lot of those seedlings, but some are in good spots so I left them to grow. The bees of all kinds just love their flowers.

     The blackberries in the wild blackberry patch next to part of my driveway are looking like what they'll eventually become. This is a close up because these green berries are actually quite tiny.

My Astilbes  are looking pretty right now too. 

    Sadly I am back to 1 beehive (the second year hive). Once again I lost  too many bees  during shipping, and even getting a second queen didn't salvage the hive. 😢 But my second year hive is still doing fantastic. And for those of you who asked, the orange bucket just covers the power box for the electric fence. I live in black bear and skunk country, both of which can destroy a hive so I have an electric fence around the bee area.

     Here's a close up of some soon to pop milkweed flowers. I'm working on getting the milkweed plants  to grow in an area where I want more wildflowers, not my actual cultivated flower bed. Last year when the pods started to open I threw them out of the garden and down into my wildflower area, and it seemed to work as I have a lot of milkweeds growing here. 

These zinnias grew from seeds a couple years old.

     This is the path down to the beehive, which goes through my wild-flower garden. I've planted things here, and also, some of my garden plants like the flowering Spirea have self seeded in this area. This year the pants have gone wild. They're huge.

     Speaking of self-seeding, This is a bed off to the side where I have more tomato and pepper plants. I switched sides this year,  but if you look between those shorter pepper plants (on the right) you can see a lot of self- seeded tomatoes growing. I'm going to have to dig them out and find a place in the actual veggie garden for them.  They're getting big fast.

    I was very bad  😏 this spring and bought myself a greenhouse. Not a big one, but to put it up I need some landscaping done to have a flat area. Good thing the hubby bought a tractor. The other day he started working on the area where the greenhouse will go.

And lastly, this cool bee was my Mother's Day gift from my daughter. 

     I'm hoping the weather is wrong, and we don't have a lot of rain like  the forecast predicts because  my daughter and her husband are coming by for the day if it's a lake day. This year since my mother-in-law is not in her house, every family is assigned a week every 3 weeks. This is our weekend, so if the weather is good we'll see my daughter. Right now that is not promising. 😟

 I am linking this post up to Gillena's  Sunday Smiles.  I hope you enjoyed the garden views, and have a super weekend!