Continuing thesis and baby related insanity on the home front means not much in the way of garden news, alas. Hopefully I will get a chance to snap some pictures in the next few days. Meanwhile I am unwinding with schemes and ruminations.

To Do in the Next Couple Months
* As mentioned, move bleeding heart and plant remaining unplanted plants
* Plant bulbs when they arrive
* Move the pampas grass, which will end up hiding the maple if it gets as tall as promised in its current location
* Cover magnolia and maple when it gets cold out
* Attempt to weed the back lawn a bit
* Possibly dig up the last bed in my patio arrangement and let it sit under mulch over the winter; I may not get around to doing anything with it next year but at least I won't have to worry about it multiplying weeds on me

Things I Will Do Next Year
* Either find another location for the cosmos or don't bother with it. As much as I love the stuff, it is too tall for its current location; it hides the climbing rose almost completely. The cleome can stay put, although I might scatter it around a little more.
* Need to use taller stakes on the delphiniums, provided they come back.
* Don't bother with the geraniums, but plant lots of begonias of many colours in the shade.
* Gird up my loins like a man and pick-n-squish all the nasty goddamn lily beetles, since they don't seem to respond to anything else short of chemical assassination.
* Chop back the invading grape vines and anonymous climbing stuff coming over the west fence.
* Mow the lawn once in a while; take Ed Lawrence's advice about raking the hell out of the creeping charlie early in the spring.
* As stated many times before: MULCH.
* Focus on filling up the shadier beds in my mad spring plant-buying.

Not a whole lot going on out there these days; this is due in part to preoccupation with other projects, but it doesn't help that it's just that time of year. Although this year, despite the seasonal rattiness of the ferns, things are still looking pretty good, so that's progress over my last garden. The climbing rose has buds like whoa - not sure if it just blooms late or if it just took this long to get established. The maple is, well, much the same, but it's not dead, so that counts as victory, right?

I mustered out briefly today to do some poking around and weeding. Pulled a whole mess of celandine out of the corner bed. I also, regretfully, dug out the dogwood, although I imagine it will be back. It's just too big and leggy for that spot, which makes the whole bed look like a mess, and I don't have anywhere else to put it right now. The bleeding heart is having a similarly wild and woolly effect on its surroundings by sprawling all over everything, so my evil plan for a week or two hence is to dig it up and move it further out into the bed. The rhododendron I snapped up on sale, meanwhile, should make a tidier replacement.

To my surprise, there's also an azalea still alive back there, and it actually looks pretty happy. I think it got chewed on in the spring - I suspect the neighbourhood groundhog, which has also snacked on my parsley and canterbury bells; must lay down some blood meal at some point - but it actually managed to flower a little while ago, and is growing busily. Once I get the bleeding heart out of the way it may even be visible.

In my crashing around I startled what I thought at first was a cricket, but it turned out to be a toad - a teeeeeeny tiny toad, about half the length of my thumb. How cool! I hope this means that the big toad I met once or twice has had babies somewhere. By the time I came back with my camera, alas, it had disappeared.