Garden Woes

Flower pictures again. I've been kind of disappointed with the garden. The Red Bed has very little red in it. Only one peony was red. The others turned out to be pink. Now the poppies are following suit. It's like someone just put any old seeds in the packets then slapped on labels to match my order. 

This is a pretty pale yellow poppy except I ordered white.

I don't know what this one is about. I ordered various red and white poppy seeds but this one got into the bunch.

 I'm not sure what this is either. A miniature poppy? I think it's growing on a red peony poppy plant. The rest of the buds are much bigger and haven't opened yet. I'll be totally disappointed if they are all this small!

This one is definitely red. I think it's a Flanders poppy, but maybe it's a red peony poppy that failed to grow peony-like. I'm baffled.

This is one of two Himalayan blue poppies I've been nursing along since last year. The ducks damaged the other one and it seems to be a goner now. This is nothing like the magnificent blue poppies I grew in Homer. The structure of the whole plant is different and the flowers are puny in comparison. They are supposed to be difficult to grow here and I would be lucky to get it to bloom a second year. It won't be a big loss. 

Here is the same flower from above. You can see the cluster of buds that grow along the tall stem, sort of the same way Brussels sprouts grow.  Downright weird.

Ah. Some poppies that grew from self seeding last fall, and look, there are white ones!

Back to the reliable roses. Showy yellow roses on a grafted bush.

Bonica, the flower demon! She's loaded with delicate roses and putting out new growth like crazy. Love this bush.

The clematis is still a show stopper. New Dawn climbing rose is having a hard time keeping up.

This is Super Dorothy. She hasn't given much new growth yet but is putting out big clusters of pretty little roses. She's a vigorous climber that is supposed to be a heavy bloomer - eventually.

Our temperatures are back down to the sixties and the dahlias and zinnias don't like it. They are growing so slowly they can't keep up with the insect damage. And in the veggie garden a rodent moved in. I saw it yesterday a few hours after the neighbors complained they had three rats eating their fallen birdseed. Not sure if ours is a rat. It wasn't very big and the tail not long like a rat's. Bigger than a mouse though. It climbed over the bed fencing and devoured the largest romanesco cauliflower plant, eating the huge leaves right down to the midrib stem. And only that one plant. I suppose it's going to return to dine again tonight. Bob tried to block it's entrance with metal fencing (it chewed through the plastic deer fencing) but it is only a matter of time before it figures out another way in. They are smart creatures.