Good morning from the garden!

I have to admit, not much is looking great in my garden right now.  The hostas are full of holes from earwigs and/or slugs, the bee balm is dried up and sad looking, the ferns are on their last legs, the tips on all of the irises are brown, and I don’t even want to talk about the pseudocercospora leaf spot fungus on my lilacs (if you haven’t heard about this, it’s rampant in Minnesota this year due to the amount of wet weather we’ve had, for more info, check out this video from Kare11).

That being said, my Japanese Spikenard is still looking gorgeous.

And the panicle hydrangeas are looking absolutely stunning this week, they love all of the rain we’ve had!  This one is my Vanilla Strawberry …

And this one is Limelight …

Here’s a better photo to put the size of that Limelight in perspective.

It’s easily 11′ to 12′ tall.  I sure do hope my new Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas perform as well for me.  FYI, I did fertilize my hydrangeas in early spring with Espoma Rose-tone.  You don’t really need to fertilize panicle hydrangeas, but I’ve read that they will grow faster if you do.  So you can bet I’ll be out there with the Rose-tone again next spring to fire up those Quick Fire Fabs (pardon the very lame pun).

Since my own garden isn’t looking especially inspiring right now, I’m bringing this Sunday morning in the garden post to you from Green Barn Garden Center’s sunflower field in Isanti, MN.

My niece and I headed up there earlier this week to check it out.

Although it was a bit of a gloomy day (and yes, there was more rain!), the flowers were sunny enough to make up for it.

Being there on a cloudy weekday meant we nearly had the entire place to ourselves.

Sunflowers take about 60 days to bloom, and they bloom for about 7 to 10 days.  So Green Barn plants five crops in succession so that they have at least one section in full bloom throughout the month of August.

They provide a bunch of fun photo spots, like this one with a piano …

or this one with an old fire truck.

There were numerous tractors that one could pose on too.

But my niece and I are of the same mind when it comes to photos of ourselves.  We don’t like them.  I did convince her to pose for just one though.

It started to drizzle about halfway through our wander around the field, so we wrapped things up after checking out a few more of the photo props like these fun bikes.

We paused at the end for one quick selfie, which both of us hated …

but we did it anyway.

If any of you locals are looking for some fun photo ops, Green Barn Garden Center should have sunflowers in bloom through Labor Day weekend.  They charge $7 admission, but you can pose for as many photos as you like (or not, in our case).  Here’s a link so you can check out all of the details.