Greetings and pic spam.

[curiouswombat]

Firstly - to everyone going to WriterCon - have a wonderful time - safe travel there and safe travel home.

For those of you staying at home like me - never mind - there will still be some of us around on LJ!

I hope everyone is coping well with whatever weather you currently have - here it is hot, for us, around 28-29C, 85F ish - although my car's external thermometer got up to 31C (90F) over lunch time, when the sun was shining on it. But we have the tiniest of breezes, which has kept it reasonably pleasant.

I have been out with my jug, watering all my plants at least once a day, because they don't last long without water, being all in pots. So under the cut are some pictures of how my plants are enjoying the weather -



My lilies have opened - they just sat there as buds for about six weeks, and I thought they would never open, but look -



The sweetpeas that I bought as one little tray of seedlings have provided height and colour in four different areas of the yard, and smell wonderful. They remind me of childhood holidays at my aunt and uncle's in a village about six miles from home - I must write about Lily and Nelson sometime - maybe later in the week!





Frog looks happier than he did last time I put a picture of him onto my journal, as he is now surrounded in colour - nasturtiums, cream marigolds, and snapdragons -



And our climate just seems to suit fuchsias - this one is in a tub in a fairly shady spot - the colours of this are really this bright -






Tonight we may well have thunderstorms, and so some of these may not look quite so good tomorrow!

Comments

[maevebran.livejournal.com]

I'm not going either. We could cook up all sorts of trouble over the weekend.

It is supposed to be around 106F this saturday. OI! I have to be outside at a demo with my Medival group.

Have a good rest of the week

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Gosh - that might be a bit hot - although I guess you could skip the normal underwear for a layer of loose cotton and stand over one of those little battery driven fans!

[myfeetshowit.livejournal.com]

We're being threatened with the 105F weather here in Oregon as well, though it has stayed below 90 so far this week.

*crosses fingers*

The bugs are unseasonably earlier, and the frogs that normally eat them are suffering. So we all suffer.

Meanwhile, though, I saw on another post that you got some awards for the last Fang Fetish round. Congratulations!

[rincaro.livejournal.com]

How lovely. Thanks for sharing.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

My pleasure!

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

Your flowers are gorgeous! The colors are so amazing. What do you feed them?

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thank you - and not a lot! I put one of those slow release pellets into each pot in the spring, then wander around with a 2litre jug pouring water on them every day!

[hobbituk.livejournal.com]

I'm going to try sweet peas next year. I bought a nice metal obilisk and everything... I love the scent of lilies, but the flowers don't last very long in my garden for some reason. Yours look really good!

I'm not a writer (do they do such a thing as readercon???) so I'm not going either. And as the temperature here in London is hitting the thirties, I am definitely wilting. It clouded over a bit tonight so I hoped for rain...but it has cleared again now. *sigh*

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of sweetpeas as a tub plant, until I bought some miniature ones last year. This year I didn't see any miniature ones, but I decided to go with full sized ones, and they seem to have coped really well. The flowers are managing not to wilt muck more effectively than me at the moment!

[elsaf]

I love your nasturtiums! I used to grow them. I just keep forgetting to plant them in the early spring.

Did you know they're edible? They taste sort of peppery. A few nasturtium blooms will dress up a salad.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I have had them in salads a couple of times - but the husband and the daughter gave them very funny looks, and left them in the serving dish!

They are so good for colour though - there are some plain orange ones in another pot, and a dark red one lurking in one of the troughs with the blue and white things - if I was an American, or straight UK rather than Manx, they would make it very patriotic!

They come up a bit randomly, as I save the seeds from year to year, but I throw them all into a bag together!

[opalescence.livejournal.com]

Oh, how lovely. The stone behind your flowers really adds a certain charm to them!!!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

The stone is the original garden walls built, when the house was, about 100 years ago. Only the neighbours have extended them up on both sides, so we have the stone up to about 3'6" and plain concrete above! I keep thinking about painting the concrete - maybe in the autumn when the plants are dieing down...

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Very nice Stargazer lilies and I love Sweet Peas but they really don't do well in this climate, it's too hot too early for them.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I bought the lilies in a kit from the local supermarket - the bulbs complete with pot and compost cost about $6. I am very plaesed with them.

I had never tried sweetpeas until last summer, and they did well - it didn't really get hot here until mid May, and then we have a few hot days followed by a cooler one or two, so they grow well without much more than regularly reminding them to grow up the canes. A couple of them are in a pot under the pear tree, and they have caught hold of a few leaves of the tree and the clematis which also grows up it and are heading up that way - which is rather fun!

[bogwitch.livejournal.com]

I got 37 degrees on my weatherstation today (and that was after I took the sensor out of the sun).

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Aaargh! That is too hot.

[jerusha]

Beautiful flowers, as always.

And it's good to know that there will still be some folks hanging about here this weekend!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

HaHa - I'll get to read your Saturday post before them all!

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

The flowers are lovely -- colors are popping right out. Keep watering!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Fortunately as they are in pots I can water the whole lot with about a gallon of water, and so I don't feel guilty about the water use!

[kazzy-cee.livejournal.com]

Lovely! My garden is suffering as we have a hose pipe ban, but hubby invested in a water butt, so we do have some water to spread around. I love your lilies!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I did have some rain water, but it's all been used up now. But at about 8 - 10 pints total a day I don't feel all that guilty!

[diachrony.livejournal.com]

The flowers are beautiful ... pretty pretty colors!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thank you - pretty icon!

[bearfacedcheek.livejournal.com]

My my what green paws has the wombat. Hmm makes me feel guilty about th eovergrown mass of weeds i call a garden.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I have been looking for a picture of it before we paved it, when overgrown mass of weeds would have been an understatement - but I can't find the disc. Which is annoying, as it has hundreds of my pictures from 3 - 5 years ago on it.

[syderia]

Your flowers are really pretty.

Thanks for sharing.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thank you - my pleasure.

[vegmb.livejournal.com]

I keep seeing posts like this on my FL with 30+ comments. I truely feel for you all. I am used to the heat, having lived in the southern US all of my life, and have always thought it would be amazing to live somewhere that you don't need an a/c. I guess there are drawbacks to that too in the event of the unusual heat wave. (When I read the 85ish part, I thought about how cool that would be. It has been closer to 100ish here.)

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

85ish is just bordering on too hot - just on the nice side of it - another couple of degrees and it gets too hot to drive around between patients - basic cars here, such as the one that my employer provides, do not have a/c - although with a few more years of these summers that might change!

[averageshmoe.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for sharing. I used to do a bit of gardening but a run in with a landlord pretty much soured me on that.

I've wanted to comment on a couple of your previous posts, but our weather has been pretty extreme over here. Either I've been exhausted from the heat or afraid to get in front of the computer due to the lightning.

What are the dimensions of the garden anyway? How did you decide what to plant? The only thing I know about the 'English' garden comes from movies like "Hope and Glory".

pgavigan

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I remember about you salting your garden!

The yard is about 30' at it's longest, and 15' at its widest, but most of it is not that wide.

And I plant the things which are easy to grow, like nasturtiums, and things that look nice as tiny bedding plants in trays at the supermarket, or the DIY store. And fuchsias - I seem to have a reasonable success with fuchsias - my Mum, and a few other people give me cuttings, and they just grow - like the one in the picture which grew from a cutting.

I got the lilies because they were cheap in a kit at the supermarket!

And this year I was going for pinks, and whites and blues - only I had a few marigolds, and then the nasturtium seeds from last year - and a few yellow poppies that I had thrown the seed into a tub and forgotten about - so what should have been sleekly colour co-ordinated is a wild assortment of colour again! I just don't think I'm cut out for tasteful - if I was I would remember what I'd planted where - :~)