Just a few photos from the garden this week…..

It seems the garden grows on– with or without my TLC!

The Comfrey is now in full bloom. I never get tired of those sweet little pink flowers.

The Lemon Balm is just beautiful right now! I have been enjoying fresh Lemon Balm tea for the past couple weeks.

The Dandelions I only just recently blogged about are already going to seed.

Orange Mint looks so pretty coming up here and there at the back end of the garden.

I have strawberry plants scattered here and there throughout the herb garden and here are a few in bloom next to some more Lemon Balm.

These cute little flowers are from a potted thrift plant that I thought did not survive winter and was tossed next to the compost. I guess I was wrong because here it blooms while growing upside down! It’s root ball can be seen in the bottom right hand corner of the photo.

Hard to believe we are almost through Spring. How is your garden growing as we begin to approach early Summer?

(All photos can be clicked on to view full size.)

A rather scary looking creature with wings is completely and totally in love with my flowering orange mint these days. It has everyone on edge and afraid to approach this pretty plant. I have not a clue what type of wasp he might be and a Google search has not led to many leads.  Perhaps he is a Potter Wasp? He is rather skittish and flies away quickly if anyone gets close (another reason he has everyone frightened).

In the picture below you can see a bumblebee to the left and the wasp to the right. Note how much larger he is in comparison to the bumblebee which is normally the largest winged insect visiting this garden.

I hope some readers out there might be able to help me in identifying this big orange wasp. He appears to be about 2 inches long (?!). Yikes. The curious thing about him is I am only finding him on my orange mint. He is visiting no other flower in the garden which I find rather interesting.

The insanely hot and long heat wave that we have been suffering through is supposed to fade away by the middle of this week. I cannot wait for cooler weather to arrive any longer! Every morning has been a challenge making sure every plant and garden bed had sufficient water to make it through the blistering afternoon heat. Watering containers on my deck twice, sometimes three times a day has been getting old and I am ready for a break!

While out dousing my container grown plants one morning I spotted some garden visitors that had originally showed themselves last year.

Some readers may remember my puzzlement as to why so many Pacific tree frogs had taken up residence in my backyard garden. I never really figured that one out and pretty much chalked it up to the very wet spring we had that year.

Last week was the first time I have seen these little guys this year. I was actually pretty excited to spot them and gathered all my kids to show them off. We huddled on the deck staring at them before I ran and got the camera. They didn’t seem to like being photographed and hopped into the massive comfrey to hide.

They obviously like my choice of using old coffee cans as pots for some of the mints I grow because that is where I would find them hiding out every morning last week. I would water a coffee can of mint and up would hop a little tree frog and perch on the edge of the can. They would sit there and stare at me for a little while as though saying, “Excuse me, but do you mind not flooding us?!”

Seeing those cute little frogs every morning made going out to water over, and over, and over not quite so bad.

Sorry if I have disappeared from the blog world this past week. I did not count on the heat zapping my energy and desire to do anything. As Karen from Greenwalks put it, it was far too hot to blog last week. I hope to get back up with everyone’s blog (as well as my own!) sometime this week. Now, come on cooler weather! We’re waiting on you!