How is your garden looking today?

Great pics, CatFish.

The raccoons recently ate every tomato that was even partially ripe, the deer sniped the tops off my new oak sapplings, and the drought is having it's way with the rest. We're under a total watering ban with the exception of new plantings. Anyone putting in new beds at this point is nuts.

The front bed looks nice, but it's on the north side and protected somewhat from the sun. The south bed is getting angry We had a little shower as the cold front came through. Just enough to keep things alive, but nothing is really thriving. Water levels in our wells are at a 40 year low. It's getting ugly.

That's tough, JB. Especially about the tomatoes. I plant in a whiskey barrel and every year the squirrels woould make a fool out of me but this year I inserted tall bamboo poles into the dirt and draped netting over them, staking it down. Tomatoes blossomed, grew and ripened on the vine and I lost only one, just yesterday, to a squirrel who I actually saw stretched between a bench and the barrel, fiddling. It managed to sink it's claws and teeth into a green, unripened one, the only one it could reach, but couldn't take it and that netting must have driven him mad. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Mr B runs the water in the upstairs bath for a few minutes before it's hot enough to use to shave or shower in the morning. We've now taken to collecting that water in 2 gal pails and using it to water the most desperate plants. Everything is dying.

I knew it would happen!
I knew if I thoroughly watered my front and back yards early this morning, all hell would break lose and it would rain!

Dark clouds in the sky; thunder and lightning; big, splotchy splats of rain.

I hope it rains for at least an hour---but I won't hold my breath.

BBB

Lily by the fence;

Over the past couple of weeks it's rained & rained & rained here. Winter finally arrives in August. The transformation in my garden is quite astonishing! Gotta get out there & do some work today!

eastern lake ontario : dry, dry, dry !
finally some rain. picking plenty of beans and tomatoes and pulling up tasty carrots - but the lawn is pretty brown. hbg

flowers in pots are doing ok , but flowerbeds look a little ratty.

eoe, I love the squirrel story. Hah!

soz : speaking of squirrels ... we have ONE sunflower(selfseeded) in our garden growing right between the beans. since it grew quite tall i poked a few sticks for support into the ground ... a squirrel decided that it was a fine climbing post and bent over the sunflower in the process. mrs h was quite disappointed seeing the sunflower all bent over, so i built an elaborate support and tied the sunflower to it. squirrel still visits to check if sunflower seeds are ready for picking . hbg

HORNWORMS! Attacked my green peppers and have damn near taken the plants down. In just two days! I've been paying close attention since discovering a few small hornworms in the tomatoes but that was several weeks ago. This evening, I went to pick a few bell peppers for my cousin to take home and noticed that a quarter of one had been eaten and when I pulled it off the vine, I spotted the first hornworm and almost screamed. It was the biggest, fattest one I'd ever seen. I clipped the leaf that it was resting on and tossed it across the yard and at least four or five more. The last three I beat with a stick. Sounds crazy but they were HUGE!
It's been creeping me out ever since. Hornworms. Yuck.

Hamburger - dry dry DRY here too. We have gotten torrential rains, but they are few and far between.....

It's been so dry in some places and too wet in others. My tomatoes drowned this year. Too much water. My flowers are long and rangy instead of full and lush. How did the farmers manage? It all seems to be such a crapshoot.

Butterflies have energed and are leaving now.
By chance I was able to get this picture of a monarch
this morning -- it wouldn't let me have a closer view, though.

I'm leaving for Bali and Singapore tonite. When I return in ten days, most of my plants that need water will be gone.

eastern lake ontario : we are waiting for the rain to start tonight. the remnant of "katrina" are supposed to give us about 50 mm ( 2 inches) of rain. we were trying to dig up some diseased shrubs yesterday but had to give up; couldn't get the roots out. the top inch of the soil is somewhat friable but underneath it's like rock - having "hardpan" for soil doesn't help. hbg

It's been raining and raining and raining and... with no particular end in sight. Pyrotechnics and absolute downpour a couple of nights ago, since then just a lot of steady drenching rain. Flood watches. Some bad runoff/ grass destruction in my back yard, but overall I'm more towards happy to finally get a good watering. Will still be happy to see the end of it, supposed to be tomorrow evening.

it'll be easier to pull the unwanted plants out after the rain

yup - that'll be fun for a Labour Day weekend

It will be! 'Specially because I think I'll be able to get the very last of it then. Oooh, that'll be a nice moment...

i'm sure there be flooding on the new york state side - black river and salmon river.
our local utility just announced that all crews have been put on alert, all vehicles gassed up. our local problem is possible overflow from the sewage pumping station; the system is being upgraded currently (separation of sanitary and storm sewers, large overflow tanks being built along lake ontario) but the whole system won't be ready for another year - so they'll probably have to dump excess sewage into lake ontario AGAIN .
what a mess. hbg

... and we're still in a significant drought!