Fantabulous Friday

Notice I'm still trying for alliteration with my blog titles. It was a great day. The weather was nice and we accomplished a lot. Dr. Yahr and Dr. Gredler were in full swing and Terry, Janice, Marv, Marianne and I worked on myriad projects. Kay was a weeding force today and actually started planting our coneflower (Echinacea) collection. We did a lot of watering to get the gardens thru the weekend. We had many "near misses" with precipitation the past couple of days. Above is a shot of our annual vinca (Catharanthus roseus) collection. Marianne has adopted this baby and has kept it looking wonderful. I'll miss this collection when it's gone and am currently taking closeups of all varieties for our plant photo records. Below is a shot I took today of our new storage shed. This has been a great group project with Vern, Dave, Jim, Dick H., Dick P., Rod and Bob A. Bob A. has been in the hospital recently and we all wish him the best. It's tough to see any of our volunteers (friends) ailing but he's a tough cookie.Our large iris collection has started to arrive. In the next couple of weeks, we should have over 500 varieties of iris arrive and these will all have to be catalogued, planted, labeled and mapped out. With the American Iris Society meeting in Madison, WI in 2010, the plantspeople that developed each of these varieties will be at the gardens to view their "babies". We can't afford to lose track of what we have and we certainly need to nurture these new plants along for the next two years. Overall we're very excited about this opportunity; unfortunately the upcoming planting coincides with our busy plant sale! Oh well. No rest for the weary as they say.

The image to the bottom right is of one of our ornamental hot peppers (Capsicum annuum). This is 'Masquerade'. Note the nice combination of colors as the fruits age from purple to red. We need a hotter August though for most of our peppers to really ripen. The big Garden Festival in early September (6th) will feature these peppers as well as heirloom tomatoes and LOTS of other neat things. We have a really exciting event this year that also includes our 10th Annual Plant Sale. Busy times but the team effort is evident and in motion.