GARDEN TOUR: Early July in My Home Garden. Balloon flower, shasta daisy and more ! #gardentour

Hi everybody, it's Lori here from Pollinator Garden Fund, gardening in upstate New York in Zone 5. And here's what's going on in the beginning of July in my garden. It's really starting to pop up with blooms now. This is the liatris or I believe it's called gayfeather. And this is just starting to bloom. This is a really great pollinator plant. This will be crawling with bees as it gets further along in the bloom. And here's more of that Cherokee sunset echebeckia. I showed this last week, but there's even more blooms now. Isn't that pretty? It's nice with the nodding onions. And speaking of the nodding onions, here they are. The bees go absolutely bonkers over these. Here's a little close up of a little bee snacking away, gathering pollen. We were out the other day and these were just full of bees. This is such a great plant. If you garden for pollinators, get this one. Here's another little strays mat dragon. And I'm going to pan back over to the echebeckia because it's very, the color is just very striking. Again, that's Cherokee sunset. I guess I could see why it's named that. Sometimes the flowers end up a little lighter in color. And these ones are very consistent in color, but they're not always that way. And over here, it's kind of the duplicate of the other side. And I have a hibiscus in a pot. This is a tropical hibiscus, and I got it probably, I don't know, four or five years ago. And I just bring it inside in the winter and it hasn't bloomed in a long time. So I thought I would try bringing it outside. And then one of my roses. This year has not been real great for my roses. I'm not sure why. They're getting eaten by bugs and they just are not thriving very well. So I should feed them more of the nodding onion. And next to that, the balloon flowers are now open. I have white ones and I have blue ones, obviously the blue ones. But are these the most fascinating flower? You can see why they're called balloon flowers. Like little hot air balloons. They bloom for quite a long time in the summer as well. Next to that is the drumstick allium. These things will proliferate in your garden. You just need a couple and then you'll have lots and lots and lots. So I had two bulbs and now I have probably a thousand. But they're very pretty. And again, the pollinators love these. They really like the allium family. Here's my Cheyenne spirit cone flower. They usually have several different colors in them. But if you look over here, this is also Cheyenne spirit. And these are older plants than those red ones. And I think this is what happens as they age. They're just getting taller and more purple. So this is going to have to come out because it's blocking one of our patio lights. But you can see right over here is one of the other Cheyenne spirits looking as it's supposed to look. Well, not quite in bloom, but that size and that color and not the purple. And the Campanula has bloomed again. I deadheaded it, not the whole long stalk, but just the little spent buds along the stalk. And now it sent out another flush of blooms on those stalks. So note to self, do that every year. Here's the dry shade bed, actually looking pretty good. The tippy pots doing nice. And this is my Deer Villa, Deer Villa, Kodiak Orange. This is a bush honeysuckle and it's a non-aggressive native honeysuckle type plant. So instead of planting regular honeysuckle, use this one instead. Has these nice pretty flowers and boy in the fall the color of the leaves is dynamic. It's a wonderful orange color. This is just panning over a little bit along the whole front bed here. Goes from sun to shade on the front of the house. And on the other side of the house, this gets almost all shade all the time. There are all these daylilies, these old fashioned daylilies planted here. And I didn't put these in, these were here when we moved in and we've just never done anything with this area. And I'm not sure I will. The property line is in the middle of this line of daylilies and, you know, my neighbor and I, we just leave it like this. This is a scan of our backyard with the patio. Got lots of foliage stuff on the patio here. And the bird feeder bed, there's actually a little nut hatch flying back and forth. We have a family of nut hatches this year and they are just the cutest things. I need to try to get a camera set up so that I can catch them up close. The birds don't always cooperate though. Here's more astilbe. It's kind of a pretty pink fuzzy fluffy flower. Even when the seed heads are just standing there, they look really nice once they're done blooming. So I usually leave them until they break and bend over. It's a long shot of the pollinator garden bed. That was just bare ground. I just had dug that up back in April. It's doing quite well. This is the mountain mint, slender leaf mountain mint, and the flowers are just starting to open and activity is starting to happen on this plant now that the flowers are actually open. Mountain mint are pollinator magnets. So any plants in that family are good for pollinators. Here's my nigella. The ones in the back I started from seed inside over the winter and they're obviously a lot taller than the ones in the front and they're also blooming earlier. But it's a mixed color of pink, white and blue. These are really fun flowers. I don't see a lot of bee activity on them. They're supposed to be popular with pollinators. I haven't seen tons of activity on them, but maybe once they bloom more, they will. Here's the butterfly weed, which is now blooming. I'm really hoping to see some caterpillars soon. I'm ready for you guys. Come on. I haven't had aphids yet this year, knock on wood. Or if I have, maybe they've gotten eaten by ladybugs, I'm not sure. It's very, very, very buggy out here. And excuse any camera motion, but I was waving away a lot of bugs. There's a lot of mosquitoes here. Here's the shasta daisy. I have a fair number of these plants. My neighbor gave me some and I had some already. These are so fun and happy, aren't they? They look good this year, too. All this bee balm is just about getting ready to bloom. It's got the buds at the very top, along with the globe thistle. And in the back, extra mosquito corner here. They're so bad back here. You get eaten alive. I've got some more daylilies and the Joe Pye weed. I did not cut this Joe Pye weed down like I did the other set. So it's almost getting ready to bloom. And coming through this back path here with lots of the globe thistle. The Joe Pye. Home flowers. And more of the drumstick alliums. And some more shastas. And my tiger lilies. Now, these are probably eight years old. And they're supposed, they used to have black spots on them and now they don't. I'm not sure because they're getting old. But it's a bit of a riddle here. So now they're all just this straight color. And decimated by the lily beetles, I have to say. I'm kind of tempted to pull up all of my lilies because they're driving me bananas. The lily beetles are. More campanula blooming. Again, I deadheaded these back here and another flush of blooms on both the blue and the white. Here's a little woodpecker friend. The woodpeckers don't really seem to mind if you come up close to them. They just want to eat. So they're pretty easy to take pictures of. But we have both downies and hairy woodpeckers. We have a lot of woodpeckers. We have red bellied and we've seen the pileated woodpecker as well. And this is a Japanese painted fern. This is in a really rocky garden bed. And it's actually doing pretty well. I have a few other ferns in here. I have pulled some ferns up from my lawn and I don't know what they are. I need to contact the native plant people and see if they know what kind of ferns these are. So I pulled them out of the lawn and put them in the garden bed and we're going to see what happens. They seem to be OK with the move. So. Yay. Anyway, that's about all that's blooming this week, everybody. I hope you have a great weekend and don't forget to like and subscribe. Bye.