The macrophylla hydrangea variety is also known as “big leaf” and I’m adding a photo here of my Endless Summer to show you the size of the leaves. This blue flowering plant is doing quite well.
The other macrophylla I have is Blushing Bride and it’s also blooming, but in white. It is also full of big, green leaves like this one. I’m hoping that as the plants mature, the flowers will show up better in stead of being hidden among the greenery.
The blue one has one big bloom on top which is slowing fading to lavender. And it has a small flower on the side which began as light lavender and is now changing to pink.
Go here to read more posts about the macrophylla hydrangea.
The Bigger Fabric GardenThe tomato bed as of mid-July
Here are two (before and after) pictures of my backyard gardens. I planted 4 tomatoes in this fabric raised bed back in June. I added a few basil plants and radishes around the edge. As you can see, by mid July they are growing like crazy. I haven’t eaten any tomatoes yet, they are still green. I have one red grape tomato that I will probably eat tomorrow and that means there will soon be more that are ripe. All my fabric raised beds are doing well except for the potatoes, but I don’t know if they are just ready to be dug.
The potato stalks look like they are dying, so I hope when I dig down into the bag I will find potatoes worth eating. Those little turd bugs got ahold of the leaves while I was away for 10 days. My carrots don’t look too good either. I haven’t grown carrots for many years because I never had much luck with them getting large enough to use.
My concrete block raised bed is also doing well. I have zucchini in that along with a couple of grape tomato plants. I just ate boiled zucchini for breakfast!
My blue hydrangea bush is blooming and I want to share my pictures.
I went away on a little vacation a couple of weeks ago and when I returned, I found that my gardens were producing some flowers! And my Endless Summer, blue hydrangea had little flowers.
I’m always eager to see the color of the hydrangea flowers, and I had only grown them for one year previously, so I hoped they would be that same pretty blue. And they are! The bloom in my picture here is so lovely. I will be using it for some new stationery at my BlueHyd store.
In the mean time, I am taking the best photos and making posters to sell at the Zazzle store. I’ve enlarged the images so they will look fine as large size prints. Just need to get them made.
Image Compare: Top right – garden hose, now removed in image below.
Iris #2
Can you see a difference in these pictures? There is unwanted clutter in the first one. The photo at the top has a garden hose on the right side of the photo, but I have removed the hose using the “clone stamp” and the results is seen in the bottom photo.
After photographing this flower I wanted to use the best pictures to make products for my online shop, but if I used this good photo of the flowers, there is a piece of an unsightly garden hose in the background.
Fortunately I have learned how to remove unwanted stuff from my photos. With a little patience, I can usually get it to look okay. If you are interested in how I removed the garden hose from my photo, read a page I wrote at Wizzley to explain ♥how to use the clone stamp in a free graphics program called paint(dot)net.
And if you want to ♥remove the entire background, for a transparent image, I can tell you how to do that too. I have to do that for many of the designs I make and sell in my stores.
This is the first time I have seen flowers on my blue and white bearded iris. It was planted about 2 years ago by me. Last summer there were lots of leaves, but no blooms. Seeing the stalk shoot up from those tall, flat leaves and end up with four buds, was very exciting for me! And it’s a beauty…
Iris in the Garden
Bearded iris are a perennial plant which I don’t know much about. I think they will multiply on their own as I’ve seen big gardens full of iris. I got a few pictures of this first flower, but the rain has kept me indoors and the other bud has opened as well.
I used this photo to show how to remove something from a photo using a graphic program. That piece of garden hose to the right in the photo is what I wanted gone. Read that post here.
Oh how I’d love to have the land in that picture I used! It’s not my yard. I don’t have a big sunny parcel of land. Because of that, it makes growing vegetables, in our short, New England growing season, tough to do. The sun is scarce in my yard, which is surrounded by tall pines and hardwood trees. My yard is also small. I’m always on the lookout for solutions to these problems so I can grow more crops.
This idea of making a raised bed from cinder-blocks is not mine. I saw it in the “Organic Gardening” book. It looks ugly, but it was free to build because I already had the blocks.
When I came across an article in the magazine which showed five types of alternative raised beds, the concrete block one jumped out at me. I could do this!
Shade is a problem when it comes to vegetable gardening in a small yard
The thought of having another sunny spot to grow vegetables stuck in my mind as winter carried on. I would have to lug the blocks up a hill to my front yard because that was the sunny spot. While I waited for the mud to dry up in spring, I watched the path of the sun to decide the best location for my new patch of dirt.
Once the garden loam was delivered, I enlisted my teenage son to help me move the blocks – those suckers are heavy! I used the wheelbarrow to fill the space with dirt and some compost, and then planted the rest a tomato and zucchini in there. It’s not a huge garden, but it did give me some extra growing space.
This was an experiment for me, and I’m not raised bed savvy. It was a quick fix for lack of garden space and I did get vegetables to grow there. Since then I have learned a bit more about raised bed gardening and am beginning a new raised bed garden (made of wood this time) in my Florida home.
An even easier idea is to buy fabric bags and use them as raised beds. They work well for many types of vegetables.
This was an experiment for me, and I’m not raised bed savvy. It was a quick fix for lack of garden space and I did get vegetables to grow there. Since then I have learned a bit more about raised bed gardening and am beginning a new 
Hydrangeas Blue 