How does my garden grow

The mulch project drags on. If you've not been privy to this saga, I have a tree lawn that is hard to water and cut, so I wanted to cover it with something to make it look nicer. I stopped watering it some time last summer , and it has looked like hell for weeks (but the weeds were doing well).

Tom (or Saint Tom, as I will refer to the gardening services guy because he worked a miracle with his rototiller) turned up the soil on the tree lawn first thing Monday morning. Then on Tuesday the nice people from the landscape supply company unloaded the three cubic yards of mulch in the street in front of my house.

Come Tuesday afternoon, I'm ready to start raking dirt into its final formation, and moving mulch. Then the rain came. I know it's just a coincidence, but for the two days we've had torrential downpours in the afternoon. Wow, lots of rain.

So my mulch pile waits. I'm happy it didn't wash away with the rain, but now it will be a few days before I can work on this. It's just so funny how this project has taken a lot of mental energy, and then, once everything's in place, I have to wait on rain.

It's OK, though, it will look nice. In other news, get a load of my Black Eyed Susans! If you garden, get yerself some of these babies, because they look like this for weeks. It's the most amazing thing; they don't seem to be dying off. That's them in the picture above. You can also see the mulch pile, drying out from the first rain.

I'll post more pictures soon, when the light is better. I'm happy with my garden this year. One of the things I really like about gardening is how it changes over time. Sure, the garden seems to peak in terms of how much stuff is flowering, but stuff comes and goes and I love investigating to see how things are doing. I put in a bunch of perennials, but am leaving space for annuals that catch my interest.

And the pumpkin. I think it's cool how bees will sleep (that's what it looks like, anyway) in the flowers, which are probably 6"x6" (plenty of room). We've got one fruit that's really taking off, and Mr W and I look at it in the morning before we get in the car. The thing is growing 1/2" in diameter a day, it seems. For all the photosynthesis going on in that monster of a plant, I guess it's not too much of a surprise.