Cicadas! And crickets! Songs of summer

The name of the game this week is maintenance, as in weed control, watering, and gutter cleaning. It's hot (again), but I try to work one hour a day outside, usually in the early morning or evening. If I do have to be out in the noonday sun, I wear a neck gaiter that helps immensely. I bought mine at Dick's Sporting Goods; they are near the checkouts.

I stole this image (but its frequent appearance on various sites makes my thievery seem okay). Despite their aggressive behavior, carpenter bees can't hurt you, which was news to me. I have been stung by paper wasps and yes, it hurts! Yellow jackets are mostly benign until autumn, when they get cranky as their food sources disappear.

I've been dipping into How Can I Help? by Doug Tallamy. It's written in question/answer format, and the questions are based on audience response after lectures. Most of it is spot on, but I have a few quibbles with him, specifically regarding mulberry trees. They are the bane of my existance while he considers them part of nature's food network. By his logic, those awful ornamental pear trees that are taking over undeveloped land everywhere are okay because the birds eat the fruit, ditto burning bush, both invasive non-natives.

His take on goutweed is making me rethink its presence under the hydrangea.

It too is an invasive non-native; its sale is banned in several states. An alternative is wild geranium, which I have in my front yard and that I notice is spreading, so there are candidates for transplanting. But first, I would have to wipe out the goutweed. No easy task.

I abandoned my idea of planting a butterflybush, but perhaps I could squeeze in a bottlebrush buckeye behind the oak tree. They have a tendency to spread via rhizome, so I would need to install some edging around it, not an easy task in my clay soil. I'll put it on the list for possibilities for next year.

Sunflowers and cup plants are starting to bloom, along with the 'Goldsturm' rudbeckia. Yellow!

Also, what I call "ditch" daylilies. Orange!

Then there are a couple of surprises. One of my goals for this year was to let some of the amaranth reseed itself. I forgot about that idea, found myself spraying what I thought were seedlings from the long-gone smoke bush, then realized those purple things were amaranth volunteers. They are popping up all over the place, so maybe I will try dyeing yarn with it again, in hopes of better results than I got last year.

Another surprise is this flowering plant. It is safflower, a volunteer growing under the birdfeeders and another candidate for dyeing. Exciting!

While taking photos, I spent some time just standing in the "meadow". Bees, bees, bees! Also, Japanese beetles, again decimating the Virginia creeper, which is okay as long as they leave everything else alone. Still no butterflies, let alone monarchs, but one can hope.

Seedy

I *finally* got around to starting seedlings. Or at least doing what needed to be done to get them started.

Something new to me is starting wild strawberry and wild petunia from seed. The seeds need to be pre-treated by stratification. The gardener mixes the seeds with damp sand to help break through the seeds' dormancy mechanism and allow germination. The mixture sits in the refrigerator for a given amount of time, 60 days for these varieties, at which time the seeds have hopefully sprouted and may be planted directly into the garden. Fingers crossed!

The other seeds that needed starting were zinnias and amaranth. This process is more "normal" - fill little pots with potting soil (I chose to top the potting soil with vermiculum), moisten the medium, then plant the seeds. Ordinarily, I would place the pots on a warming pad, but this year I have too many for that. The flats are in a room that is fairly warm and protected from Beau the Feline Destroyer.

Each packet of zinnia seeds contained 40 seeds, although they are so small I was skeptical. However, when I counted them out, there were 41 seeds in each. A while back I learned that the gardener does not need to use more than one seed per pot, so that is what I did here. There are some leftovers in case some of the seeds don't germinate.

If the zinnia seeds seemed tiny, the amaranth seeds made them look like giants. The package contains 100 seeds, but all I needed were six. In this case, I did plant two per container, just because they are so small.

By the way, amaranth is a ancient grain, but I plan to use my plants for dyeing yarn.

It feels like March around here, especially with the wind - in like a lion. Around town, forsythia is blooming and magnolias are budding. The birdhouses are cleaned and hung. The lawn is green and will soon need to be mowed. The yard awakens.