My zinnias plants are large and flowering in mass. about 50 fot of bed 3 foot wide. The cosmos are almost all flowering and about a foot bush now. Their about 60 foot and 4 feet long beds. I tried Double Click this year and most of that variety can’t support the flowers even in a cage, and are very subseptable to bores. The one hollyhock finished off at 8 foot 7 inces for the tallest spike. the plant filled about a 5 foot diameter ground space and had about 500 individual flowers in the end. My foxgloove has been flowering in spikes for about 3 weeks and is about 30 plants. The delphinium palnts are filling in and hopefuly next year il have the normal mass planting, which is a nice show case planting. I wanted hundreds of pete marigolds this year and that varity is a 6 inch one. There good for reducing nematodes and keeping rabbits from the stuff behind them, besides looking nice. Their all in the front of the other rows, and have grown to 2 and a half feet, so the company that screwed me once before has done it again. I’ve had to resort to triming them as a boxwood hedge would be, to keep the roses alive. The roses are another sore point because this year I bought my favorite ones and ended up with 2 varieties in 6 plants which should all be different. I’ve remembered wy I stopped growing glads, and am replacing them with some straw flowers I started in pots to fill in the garden later. The blackeued susans were terrific this year, I had a good assortment and many doubles that reached 8 inches in diameter on thge flower. The Evening Prime Roses are hugh and flowering. My new planting of chives in a bed for spring flowers filled in solid. Lat years irsih bed redo had half the plants flower this spring and should be up to full strength next year. The redone tiger lilies managed about 12 flowers on 5 foot plants. They should be to 20 flowers on a 7 foot plant next summer.
I left out the Border Dahlias. There’s about 75 linear feet of border dahlias about 2 foot round and they have bloomed since mid June. There one of the easiest good loooking extented bloom flowers out there. I have a couple long trumpet vines I’m hoping to turn into a free standing tree, with weaving and pruning over a couple years. I have two rose root stock plants that I want to graft, but it’s getting late to do here, and I still don’t know which type of grafting is best. The other roses are big enough to take cuttings from.
The meter reader loved the garden and the hollyhock especialy at the time. I got the little kid approval last week. She said that she never seen so many flowers at once, and of coarse you have to send some home with her. I considered sending some to places, but I don’t have vases and won’t be purchasing them. I have to worry about frost starting in three weeks. The garden can go untill the end of October, if we don’t get the 2 or 3 frosts early in September.
I was hoping some of the gardeners would fill us in on how things are going. How’s the garden dopers?
Not as nice as yours, by the sound of it. I’ve got some serious late-summer rattiness going on.
We had a heat wave that took out a few plants, but the wisteria loved it, the new kiwi vines loved it, and the tomatoes are sweeter than they’ve ever been. I have no more lawn, and now have bark mulched paths running between strips of plantings–buddleia, rudbeckia, rosemary, lavatera, lilac, and hydrangea to name a few of the more splashy plantings. I have been working on concentric circles of woody herbs to keep the deer away from my peach tree. And this year I planted several bunches of Japanese blood grass.
The garden sounds nice. I always wished I could grow wisteria, but it dies off in the winter every few years. I’m at the northern limit for peach trees too.
I’m not a gardener but I’ve had 2 gardens (one veggie garden and 1 flower bed) imposed on me at my house…
My uncle’s veggie garden is kicking major ass. I gave him a 10x15 plot and bought him a little fence to protect it. He planted:
peas
plum tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
cucumber
summer squash
zinias
cantaloupe
broccoli
lima beans
He cut out the grass by hand (er, with a spade) and turned over all my crappy clay soil, and planted all that stuff from seeds. I bought him some peat moss and some kind of topsoil, and put all the ashes from my brush burning (mostly apple trees) on it.
The little area is completely overgrown now. The broccoli only produced one usable head and the peas quickly came and went.
The squash is all over the place (we pick 4-5 a week) and the cantaloupe is vining outside of the fence (haven’t picked it yet. soon.)
The zinias are awesome. I cut 2 or 3 a week and bring them inside. They’re hearty as hell.
The cucumbers are doing quite well. We’ve picked several. Some he picked small and pickled them. Last week my mom made a cucumber salad for everyone.
The tomatoes are now ripening full blast. We pick every 2 or 3 days now. Yesterday we got about 10 plum tomatoes and a pint of cherry tomatoes. They are soooo delicious!
I’m really proud of my uncle. We’ve had spurts of heavy rain (maybe once a week) mixed with 90-100 degree weather the last few months. Now we haven’t had rain for a couple weeks although the temp has gone down. I told him I wouldn’t remember to water the garden, and I haven’t watered it since the plants were still seeds - and everything’s growing.
On the flip side…the flower bed in the front yard that my neighbor planted for me isn’t doing so well. The daylillies have died out and look like shit. The daisies look all burnt up and crappy. My clematis is burnt up too and only hanging on to the trellis because I put it there. The spuria (??) bushes look decent, thank god. Not sure what the hell else is in there but nothing looks good. The yew bushes I transplanted haven’t died yet…so that’s good.
The death and destruction is partly my fault because I just don’t water them enough. It’s partly my neighbor’s fault, though, because I TOLD her that I wasn’t going to remember to water as much as I should. I was about to plant grass when she ran over and told me I needed a garden and she’d plant it. Oy.
I’m waiting for winter to come so everything dies and gets some proper hydration and comes back all green next year. blah.
Regarding random plants…my uncle’s bee balm that he found and transplanted was rocking hard all last month. Beautiful red flowers. His butterfly bush got transplanted to the front yard, knocked over by some workers, and is being held up by a bamboo pole now. It looks healthy but no flowers. The grape vine is growing like a champ and climbing the arbor I built. The huge blackberry patch has been thusly sentenced to death by me as soon as I get around to it. The apple and pear trees can go to hell.
Meh. Plants. 
The Bee Balm is bergamot which is purple for most of the country. The red variety is native to the East Coast. The wild stuff grows in the hot dry sandy praries in Wisconsin, so is good at drought survival. You may find Black Eyed Susan (Rudbecka) a good plant for your yard and Purple Coneflower (Echinacea). A good way to follow up peas is with a planting of bush beans. There’s just enough time after the peas finish to get a crop before fall. You can plant some leaf lettuce at this time and it should be cool enough not to bolt when it gets larger.
Rosemary, oregano, and lavender pretty much don’t want extra water, so they might be good for your yard.
Maybe spirea?