Cicadas and lightning bugs

Last week while I was driving home from work,  I found my street covered with lightning bugs, so busy with their flashing that it made the street all sparkly. I had never seen them covering a street before. It was very pretty. But as I made my way up the street, I hoped I was not crunching too many of them. :-/

Now that it's hot out, the lightning bugs are everywhere and making up for lost time. They are driven. Sometimes I see them high up in the trees and on other nights they are all low to the ground. This year there seems to be a heck of a lot of them.

Last week I also heard my first cicada of the year. I am one of the few that loves the sounds of cicadas because they're just so darn enthusiastic about everything. And I love lightning bugs because of their clumsy flying and what they have to do to get attention. I think they're completely unaware that absolutely everyone can see them but the one they are flashing their lights for. "Look at me, look at me, whoooooooaaaa........sorry, lady." But put the two of them together? Oh my, that was something. It seemed like there was one lightning bug for every square foot in the backyard and it didn't take long for Violet and me to want to get away from all that activity and get indoors. 

This is a short video of my completely neglected backyard. I don't think you can see the lightning bugs very well but trust me, the air was thick with them. The cicada? Oh, I don't think you can miss that.

Peony update

Once again, a complete row of peonies was successfully removed by one driven turtle over a period of a couple days. You can now start to see how the ground gets compacted where that one turtle (who is not Cathy Jean) stomps back and forth during the day until those peonies are gone and out of his way for another year. When it rains, water flows down the two little gullies created by the opposing pairs of turtle feet. It's frustrating...but it's also kind of funny, I guess you can look at things from two points of view at the same time. Errrgh. Turtles. Actually, just one turtle (who would never be Cathy Jean).

The backyard is really looking awful because I haven't spent much time in it this year and besides, it's been so darn hot. It's almost July and I am still potting up bulbs which should have been potted up in....oh.......April at the latest. Oh well. Things will grow if they want to grow.

I never have much luck with petunias but I'm trying to grow them again this year.  I do have a lot of luck with golden lysimachia however. I remember seeing this plant for the first time on a water garden tour covering an entire backyard slope to a pond. It was memorably lovely. Lime green is one of my favorite colors and I think any color that gets itself next to it is the better for it.

The pansies are still blooming but they're soooooo tiny.

Another plant that is predictably pretty without much attention is Crossandra. It's sold as an annual but you can bring it indoors for the winter and it is a perfectly good non-complaining houseplant. This one is called "Orange Marmalade (the plant on the left is a caladium)."

This is a close-up of another variety of crossandra I bought last year. The flowers on this one have have more yellow in them.

Orange flowers are very pretty to me. The tawny daylilies are now winding down and even though they're the most ubiquitous daylily there is, I still really like them. 

This calla lily almost looks like it's got a lit cigarette in there. I guess that's appropriate because callas certainly have a garden porn aspect to them. :-)

Every year I try to get as much orange into the garden as I can, as well as lime green and purple. These three colors are the core colors for my garden every year.  I hope to really get started on that poor garden soon.... and also to keep four determined turtle feet off everything that gets planted. I'm thinking there are a lot of broken garden dreams ahead for me but for one turtle (who will never be Cathy Jean), this looks like this is setting up to be one fun summer.

Voodoos

Remember these from about a month ago? The stinky voodoo lilies?

I guess the flies did their job because I now have seedpods. 

And it didn't take long for the spotted stalks to come up...

Even some precocious unexpected baby stalks came up. It takes a day or two for all of them to spiral out their fronds.

I now have whiskey barrels full of these things. It took only a month to go from flower to full grown plant.

At the end of this summer, I could have hundreds of these things. Hundreds. 

A couple years from now...oh, I could have thousands of these things. Thousands. My present little plot on the prairie is going to look like something from the set of an old Outer Limits show...if it doesn't already. :-)

Bright eyed

That's what I saw when I brought the turtles their breakfast this morning...Michael Ray and Cathy Jean, side by side with their front legs on the plank, two very happy and bright eyed turtles enjoying some sun before it got too hot.

But as soon as I set the plates down, Michael bolted for his tomato and strawberries and I missed my photo opportunity of the two of them (I cannot believe I'm about to say this) being cute.

Different story when I got home and it was 100 degrees outdoors, or something like that. It was horribly hot so the turtles got themselves and their area hosed down while they tried to keep cool in the shade.

But in the meantime, Violet could not get enough of the horrible heat. Her fur was all puffed out so I could describe her as being bushy-tailed. However, for being so bushy-tailed, she was not about to move from her sleeping box any time soon. There is nothing she loves more than to be heated up to the point of being combustible.