When you walk outside in the morning, it is hard to believe we are in Arkansas in August! I am not complaining, but wow, what nice weather. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope this is what we have the rest of the summer. I will take lower humidity and milder temperatures; now if we could just throw in a little rain. . . .
We were supposed to get quite a bit of rain this past week, but I got last than ½ inch for the entire week. I tried skipping a day watering the pots on the deck and they showed their unhappiness,
so it was back to watering. I try to water first thing in the morning. The flowers are growing like gangbusters this year.
My moonflower morning glory is absolutely loaded with flowers.
I get at least 3 or 4 open blooms every night.
They smell amazing. When it was hot in the mornings, they were gone before I made it outside. Now with the cooler mornings, the flowers linger for an added whiff of fragrance to start my day.
I love fragrance in the garden and I have several fragrant blooms right now. I still have some gardenias,
my Summersweet clethra is blooming,
I have a sweet scent in some of my panicle hydrangeas,
I have a few blooms on my Little Gem magnolia, and my harlequin glorybower is starting to bloom.
There is a lot of color in my garden right now. The surprise lily (Lycoris) are blooming,
and I have quite a few blooms on the Encore azaleas,
in addition to hydrangeas, perennials and annuals.
My squash plants got attacked by army worms and then millipedes came in and finished off the vines.
I didn’t know that armyworms could kill a squash plant, but they can. I thought it was squash vine borers, but there were no borers inside the stem, but the armyworms were feeding at the base. I found an armyworm pupa,
and have destroyed it too. If I hadn’t seen the armyworms earlier, I may have suspected the millipedes killed the plants, because there were lots of them eating the dead vines. Millipedes feed on decaying organic matter and can come in large numbers. I cleaned up the bed and will plant something new this week. I am getting loads of peppers, my tomatoes are doing pretty well, along with eggplant, and I have my first blooms on okra.
My weed plague continues. When I walk my garden to enjoy the flowers and plants, I try to put blinders on to the weeds! It seems the more I weed, the more they grow. That will be a chore once again this week! Luckily, I have nice weather to weed in!