The Flower Bed

 I spent some time in the flower bed over the weekend. Mostly I planted the annuals for bees and butterflies and weed whacked the hillside. The perennials I planted earlier in the week are doing well. So this is what is blooming in early June.

recently planted columbine

the other newly planted columbine

tiny pink flowers

the leafless columbine

This is the older columbine. This one and a yellow one were planted in 2019. Last year the yellow one lost all its leaves. I thought maybe when the lawn care guys sprayed for weeds they may have gotten some on the yellow columbine, but no other flower was affected. The yellow one did not make it through the winter. This year I noticed some leaves missing on this columbine and thought the same thing may have happened. Hmm. Earlier this week I saw two little bunnies in the area. Earlier this week there were SOME leaves on the columbine. It's the bunnies! All the other flowers have gotten sprayed with a deer and rabbit fence product. Hopefully it will keep the bunnies from eating the leaves on the other columbine. They got to chew on the tulips; the least they could do in return is leave the other flowers alone!

pin cushion is a new plant

these beautiful peonies are in a yard on the other side of the ditch

my peony had two buds; only one is left

with all the rain last weekend, I had to cage the plant to help 

keep it upright

As I was weed whacking the ditch hillside, I noticed some new tracks in the mud.

Deer tracks! We know deer visit the area as friends post photos of the deer feeding from the bird feeders. This is the first time I have seen evidence of them on this side of the road.

Lots of green in the flower bed. Hopefully, there will be flowers on those plants come summer!

This is the area planted with the annuals for the bees and butterflies. Light rain is in the forecast this weekend. I am hoping it is a light rain and not the gushers of last weekend that washed away the wood chips from the perennial bed.

The neighbors and I have some wild rose bushes on our side of the ditch between their raised vegetable bed and my flowers bed. We try to nurse the bushes along by carefully trimming the grass around the little bushes. 

And I have a wild yarrow plant that needs some TLC. At least I think it is yarrow and not Queen Anne's Lace. I try to keep the grass trimmed around it. 

*** An update on the hillside mounds from the Maybe Spring Will Arrive blog post. The lawn care company  told us the mounds were caused by voles. The only way to get rid of them before they invaded the lawn was to contact a pest control company, which I did. The pest control company told me they were caused by pocket gophers which I have never seen in the area. I since learned my neighbor smoothed out the mounds with a rake because she thought I had emptied my flower pots on the hillside. The guy from pest control could not find any holes because the mounds had been raked. There are no new mounds. The pocket gophers have moved back to the area fields. I think they liked my hillside because there were lots of flower seeds from the annuals and perennials last fall. So there. Mystery solved. Pocket gophers eat seeds and I had plenty at the end of summer.