How's It Growing: July 18, 2025

How has a month passed already without a garden update?! I think the heat wave melted my motivation. It hasn’t melted the gardens fortunately and the heat interspersed with lots of rain has boosted the growing power of all the plants.

The early bird dahlia, Totally Tangerine, has shown up all the other dahlias once again by being the first to bloom.

It is also the time for towering Lamb’s Ear flower stalks. We have a lot of Lamb’s Ear in our gardens because it is one of the few plants you can depend on NOT being eaten by the local critters.

And speaking of critters - we had these two visitors to the inn early one morning.

The deer aren’t the only frequent visitors to our grounds. Can’t forget the ever eager to chew the vegetation wild rabbits!

Those eager teeth is one reason that I final put up a fence around the new garden bed I’ve been trying to create in front of our cottage. Even though I was planting strictly plants labeled as “deer resistant,” they were constantly being eaten. This is a fence system that comes in 12” panels, making it ideal for using to surround a garden bed that is not straight sided. So far the barrier is working.

So what’s newly blooming around here you might ask. Well here’s a dump of flower photos to give you an idea of the summer show that is just starting.

And last but not least - a shy dahlia peaking out behind its leaves.

The vegetable garden is also coming long nicely. We’ve had some disappointments, but over all things are looking good. Because of the late very cold temperatures at the end of May, when we had already planted out seedlings of tomatoes, squash, peppers, eggplants, and tomatillos, some of these seem to have been stunted beyond recovering, especially the tomatoes. Well, that’s gardening and the unpredictable nature of weather for you. Below are photos of what is doing well in the garden. The first image is of Blackberry Potatoes, in case it wasn’t obvious.

That’s the latest garden news from our neck of the woods. By the time the next update rolls around our mixed cutting flower bed will be full of blooms I am sure. The first flowers starting to show are some cosmos and zinnia. I can’t wait to see the sunflowers. I prepare this flower bed by just buying a bunch of annual seeds of our favorite cutting flowers, mix them all up in a bowl, scatter them over the soil and then just wait to see what comes up.