Peonies

I have always loves peonies and wait every June for these beautiful flowers to bloom, and I am happy to report that they finally have. They always seem to take forever to bloom, and don't last for very long, but I feel that they are worth the wait and I love being able to enjoy their beauty, even for that short time. I have created an annual ritual of cutting some of the flowers, that goes something like this: I very cautiously cut several of the flowers, while trying to avoid the many ants, spiders and earwigs (my least favorite insect!) nestled inside, shaking the flowers off the entire way through the backyard to the back porch, sometimes letting them sit their for a while to get rid of any lurking insects, cutting the extra leaves off, shaking them (again), and then putting them into a beautiful cobalt blue vase and bringing them inside. The flowers usually keep for a week or so, before we have to throw them out, although a couple of years ago, they wilted after only a couple of days, and we couldn't figure out why. I think it may have had something to do with the air though, because our bread was also going bad really fast during that time. Some pictures of the peonies are posted below. :)

Peonies in their special blue vase

As for gardening news, we have been a little behind with tilling and weeding the garden, and I still haven't planted the last few things, but they are in pots and already pretty big, so I'm hoping that they'll be fine for the next day or two. The plants that are already in the ground, include sugar snap peas, pickling cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, some preexisting, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, Logan berry bushes/plants, and some grape vines, and a marionberry plant that my mom got this year. The plants still needing to go into the ground, include zucchini, yellow summer squash, pumpkin, 4 different types of tomato, and some walla walla sweet onions. I'm hoping to be able to go get a few more starts, but I will have to see where we are after planting what we have so far. I'm really looking forward to trying my hand at canning pickles and tomatoes this year. Hopefully it will all work out, without any big accidents.