The Plants

I wondered as we were driving home what my yard and plants would look like after being left on their own for 7 weeks with the hot, hot temperatures Arkansas was experiencing while we were gone enjoying ourselves in the mountains and the cool 70 degree temperatures that we experienced almost the entire time we were gone.

I should have taken a before an after picture of my big blue hydrangea bush that I have had for almost 20 years.  I really didn’t know if it would revive itself – but it is!!  When we got home the entire bush was totally limp – the leaves all facing downward and a very light color – this is after I left the hose running on it twice at about 30 minutes each to drench the area with water.  It will survive

Back in early April after a 3 week delay I had 10 tiny scarlet maple trees that I planted.  They should have went in the ground in March but they lost my order.  I went ahead and planted them and wondered if they would still be alive – I really didn’t think any of them would be alive – surprisingly 3 of the 10 are alive.  This one is in the sun, the other two are part shade. Didn’t grow! but still alive.

The monkey grass and the hostas are still alive but I cut the two cinnamon ferns down to nothing and I’m watering – maybe they will come back, if not this fall maybe I will be surprised in the spring.  I hope so they were both about 3 feet tall and about 2 feet wide at least.

Well we can all see how this garden did!  I wonder if anything will come back.  I do not intend to start pulling anything up and replanting this fall – I really want to see if the plants just went dormant and will come back in the spring.  I will decide then what to do about it.

The dogwood tree – lower leaves are all dried up but the upper leaves are fine.  We watered this area two times since we got home 48 hours ago.  As you can see what passes for a grassy lawn is dried up brown – it is more weeds than grass – we would have to sod the whole place to have decent grass with as rocky as our soil is.

This tree looks dead – that is ok, I didn’t want it anyway – there is a redbud growing someplace in that area and I want that one instead.

This garden – well what can I say – as soon as I can I will get started deadheading these Black Eyed Susan’s and scattered the heads where they can seed and make me some new plants!  I will give this area some water and see what happens.  The tall lilies flowered before we left so they are doing their normal thing and starting to dry up.

We have been home 48 hours and I feel like I will never get caught up.  We ran into the mailman when we were grocery shopping after we got home and he said he would bring the box of mail collected up while we were gone to save a trip to the post office – nice man!  But it took me almost 2 hours to go through all the mail today – of course after I organized things into stacks the largest was the mail order catalogs that I normally throw away anyhow! the next size was the credit card offers that need to be shredded.  All but one of our bills can be done on line so not much in that stack!  (and I actually called and got the total for that bill over the phone so didn’t need these bills – they will get shredded too)

I have all of my quilting things put back where they belong and did a little stitching on the last appliqué block that I never finished on the road. I also got the quilt out that I had brought along to quilt and never did – I worked on it yesterday afternoon while hibernating in front of the tv while it was 96 outside.

I need to press and square up the July stars that I hand pieced on the road for the Star Crazy BOM – and I printed out the instructions for the August BOM pieces.

All in all I have gotten some done since we got home but I think I will be watering plants all week – good news is that by Wednesday it should be back in the 80’s and get this – maybe high 50’s at night! sounds like maybe the heat wave broke just as we were getting home – hope so!!

EDITED:  Several have asked what kind of pen do I use to mark the blue lines – this one is Mark-B-Gone, I have used other brands and find that in my opinion all blue wash out pens work about the same, I have used several kinds.  I never have a problem with wash out – use plenty of water and wash two times if needed – put no heat near it until the blue is washed out.