September Bloom in Experimental Garden

I love hot summer weather and it is a good thing because North Carolina has just completed the hottest summer on record. 

 

Bees are still coming to the garlic chives.

thank goodness for those volunteer morning glories that are giving us such beautiful color and we do not even have to water them.  Good thing because we are in a drought.

Sedum is changing color.

And the polinators are hard at work gathering the late pollen.

Good ole begonias continue to give us colorful blooms.    

 

The last of the peppers are struggling in the hot dry weather.

Gotta love my banana trees that my daughter (check out her blog here)   gave me several years ago.  They survive our winters and come back every year.  Even if they have not bloomed for us yet.  

 

Now I am collecting milkweed pods and hope to grow some in my garden next year.

Then we will have more blooms for our favorite pollinators, the girls honey bees and the butterflies.  

 

Garden gone wild

We decided to add some plants to our fish pond last spring.  We chose two water lilies and one purple blooming pickerelweed.  Note the last four letters in the name!

Good new:  the purple blooms attract butterflies.  They cannot stay away from them.  While we enjoyed watching the butterflies on the blooms, we could not help but notice that the pickerWEED was taking over the fish pond.  It was HUGE, and did not stop growing. 

We decided to put an early end to the plant before the first frost killed it and we were left with a HUGE soggie plant. 

To put things in perspective this is the pot the plant came in when we bought it.

Who could have guessed?  They could have posted a disclaimer on it ...let the buyer beware.

As we lifted, pulled, tugged the plant from the fish pond the water level fell several inches.  The pickerWEED filled the wheel barrel. 

The water lillies still fill the fish pond but the gold fish and frogs were so happy to be able to swim again.  We will tackle the water lilly removal later.