Flowers of June in my #Bloomingdaledc front yard

hydrangea

Asiatic lilies

day lilies

The June garden is jammed with flowers of the brightest colors and I'm quite dreading the heat of July that will kill these blooms. But for a month at least I have this wonderful bluish purple hydrangea bush that seems to have at least two dozen heads.  I suspect the coffee grounds I pour on this bush are helping to make the soil more acidic which makes the flowers bluer but I'm really not sure about that.  Then there's the lovely popping red of the Asiatic lilies which come up from bulbs and seem to double every year. They are being eclipsed by the bright orange day lilies who are invading the yard without mercy.  I was weeding around them all this morning and pulled what felt like a million columbine vines which were curling their way up these flowers and getting a good stranglehold on some of the buds. So I yanked those climbers out and found that very soon I'd filled a trash bag with weeds and leaves and other yard debris. I also found that the pollen from the day lilies had dyed my wrists orange!  Hubster says I should wear gloves in the garden when I do this, but invariably I'm weeding on a whim and don't have the garden gloves at hand. Also, I have a faint hope that the plant juices that get on my skin are actually good for me!

Trams and Bikes Rule in Amsterdam

While there are cars in Amsterdam the 740,000 city residents pedal around on bikes or take trams to get around.but it seems like bikes dominate. You can't go down any street or alley or go over any canal bridge without practically tripping over a bike locked to a fence or pole. While you're avoiding these, at least a dozen bikes will whiz by you, the users pedalling madly over the cobblestones or transporting any type of good on a front or back bike rack, or on both ends. We saw more than a few parents with children perched on the handlebars and great loads of books and boxes and other material carried along on the back of the bike.  There is even a parking lot for about 9,000 bikes at the train station since commuters leave their bike at the station when they leave Amsterdam to work elsewhere. It turns out that at their destination they may have another bike that they use to go from the train station to the job. It was certainly eye opening to see so much day to day business carried on by bike. And it didn't look one bit like DC at all!

Image via Wikipedia

Home Grown Tomatoes Are the Best

This evening I cut open one of the tomatoes grown in the back yard and that I'd picked recently. This one smelled amazingly like a tomato should, a little sharp and sweet and like the garden somehow. It was filled with very bright red fruit and almost no seeds and was totally delicious with fontina cheese and avocado. So far, I've grown about two dozen tomatoes and pick them when they are orange red off the vine and then sit them in the sunny window to finish the ripening process. I put them all in a bowl and we eat them like any fruit, with whatever else it is that we are eating.Miraculous!