My Half Acre of Paradise

The title of this post is from a recent song by Five for Fighting (The Riddle). Anyway, those words keep running through my mind this week, as we’ve had two storms sweep in and blow summer far away. The first was last Friday, which brought snow to the mountains. It’s pretty to see Mt. Timpanogos and Lone Peak covered in snow, but it’s also sad when you love summer as much as I do. My absolute favorite time of year is from June 1st to mid July. So many flowers are blooming in the garden, and the hillsides are still pretty green. The whole natural world is picking up the pace after recently waking up. I just love it. So, it’s sad when August brings the foreboding hints and then September clinches the deal.

But, still, there are some nice things about fall, as temporary as they are. Here are the beginnings of fall colors in my yard, first from a Golden Rain tree and then from a Peking Cotoneaster shrub:

Also, we took a very quick drive up American Fork canyon on Monday, and here’s a shot of some of the Rocky Mountain maples turning red. We need to get back up there soon and do some family pictures in the fall colors.

Two days ago, the twins and I picked all the Jonathan apples, except two or three still on the tree. This is early for them to be ripe, but several more fell off the tree in the previous few days, and I decided they must be ripe enough. They taste great — perhaps slightly tart, but I think they’re quite ripe. A few had bird damage, and some have worm holes — we’ll slice those ones and throw away the damaged parts.

I think they might have ripened early because of slight water stress. I think the tree’s roots have outgrown the little drip irrigation emitter, and perhaps it wasn’t getting enough water. I tried to soak it with the hose, but I really only remembered to do that probably three times in the past two months.

I made an apple pie on Sunday from these apples, and it was tasty. I think I’ll look for a more “whiz-bang” recipe, though, since this pie recipe is just a classic grandma-style apple pie. I think there are some cooler ones out there, perhaps with caramel or something else to make it a smoother flavor.

I’m growing a few flowers that I would not recommend, or at least I don’t want to grow them again.

This is Cosmos bipinnatus ‘Double Click.’ I was pretty excited to grow it last spring when I ordered the seeds from Thompson and Morgan. I need to remember that Cosmos get mildewy very easy, even in our dry mountain climate. The foliage on these plants is a mess, and the flowers are held in awkward positions. The stems got twisted instead of standing up straight. And they ended up blocking a sprinkler from reaching some daylilies, and it wasn’t worth killing a few daylilies for these!

This is a perennial I’ve had for at least four years. It’s Anthemis tinctoria ‘Kelwayi’ and it’s a major thug. It spreads everywhere in my yard (and neighbor’s yards). It only looks good in June, when it first flowers, and after that it’s a messy mass of seed-producing ick. I think next year, I’ll tear them all out and begin eradication!

Actually, I had another plant like this that I recently placed on the seek-and-destroy list: Achillea. Can’t remember the exact variety, but it was supposed to be a mixture of whites, pinks and reds, I think. Turned out to be a major, major weed. I’m finding seedlings in the front flowerbed and yanking them whenever I can. I think next year might be the year to show Anthemis its doom as well! :-|

Today, I fertilized my lawn with Vigoro weed and feed. I hope the weed control part of it works, because I have some dandelions and other weeds in some parts of the grass.

I injected quite a few tablespoons of iron into the ground around my sick maple, using my old watering “syringe” thing. I just dumped a tablespoon at a time into its little fertilizer receptacle. Hope I didn’t overdo it! The tree is already dropping a lot of leaves because it’s been weakened by chlorosis this year. I was planning to put some implants in the trunk to give it more iron in the spring, but now I wonder if that might be too much with all the iron I put into the soil.

I took out a sprinkler valve solenoid to see if replacing it would make that sprinkler valve turn off properly. It’s a valve that keeps on running when the next valve opens, causing it water too long in that area and waste water. Well, the sprinkler place was closed (Labor Day), so I tried something else. I removed another solenoid and swapped their places. This put the bad solenoid on a smaller group of sprinklers — one that wouldn’t waste as much water if it ran on too long. I confirmed that it was the solenoid causing the problem, because now the formerly bad valve is working great and the formerly good valve is sticking some. I’ll have to pick up a few solenoids, because I’ve also noticed another sprinkler valve (station #2) sticking.

Also, a few days ago, I sprayed the backyard rose hedge with Miracle Grow. I hope they start blooming more. They have been better this summer than last year. I think they were getting too much water before, and I need to adjust the sprinklers by them, because half of the hedge is getting more overspray than the other half, the wetter part is blooming less.