Yard Happenings And Whatnot

The zinnias right off the back porch are starting to bloom. Here's the first one.

I had about a dozen come up in the same area, but three of them didn't make it through the June heat. I have two others on the other side of my eucalyptus that have survived thanks to the shade from that tree, and have two more that have just sprouted at the base of the tree (from dirt I moved around when starting to build the extension on our deck).

Speaking of said deck, here's the latest on it. I've ran out of lumber from the old arbor I tore down off the back of the house. I'm thinking about resurrecting my planter that I had built on the arbor about a year ago to fill in part of the void, leaving a narrow strip left to cover. Doing this would cut the lumber I need in half to finish the job, and leave me a nice place to plant a few more things. We'll see if this idea is approved by the building inspector (Emily).

The calomonden is taking off in this humidity, and in the next two pictures you'll see that it's covered in hundreds (thousands?) of new blooms. I don't remember it ever blooming this heavily during the summer, but watered and fertilized it heavily today so the tree can support as many of these new fruit as possible. You can smell this tree as soon as you walk out the back door, it's blooming so heavily right now. I love ever bearing citrus trees, I wish our orange and lemon trees did this (with them you get one chance a year to make the growing conditions optimal, or else you lose your fruit and get nothing off the tree until the following season).