Gardens Home & Garden

You certainly get both in farm buildings but I suppose there is plenty of spillage for both.
My neighbour had one of those climbing hydrangeas which spread onto both houses. It always had a blackbird nest and I loved it, but they took it down. I can confirm that it doesn't harm the mortar, but it is hard to get the remains of the suckers off the rustic brick that my house is built with - not that it bothers me much. I have thought about planting another one against the garage wall. i wouldn't like it to get into the flat garage roof though - which is what the jasmine keeps trying to do.

Ugh. Our summer has arrived. 95+ temps. Hopefully my plants will handle it - I need to up-pot a few but I can't stand the heat. My sleep is off and I'm getting headaches.

I'm hoping it will cool down enough to get the swimming pool cleaned out. If it doesn't get cleaned out by mid-July, I think I'm going to take it down and get something smaller that I can just sit in. That would give me room for more plants too!

Yes, it’s been warm here too, but obviously not as hot as where you are, it’s giving 31+ degrees tomorrow which is roughly about 87 + from the south upwards. I just bought the dog a new paddling pool for him to cool down in, as he does like a good paddle, so I throw the ball in it and he dives in, problem is it’s only water and I have to keep emptying some out and changing it otherwise it would look like a swamp in a few days.
I’m trying to refrain from getting more plants at the minute, my daughter rolls her eyes at me when I come home with a new one.
Can’t wait for it to fill and already in it

Yes, I'm getting fed up of watering all these pots. The pink daisy flowers have bleached and something is eating the petals! Such a disappointment after them doing so well last year. My spray gun turns own to a hardly visible mist and Tally seemed to enjoy being misted after her walk in the woods tonight. TBH if I didn't have thin hair I would have misted myself too!
This is my colour change hydrangea, taken last weekend it has just started to get a pink tinge this week. It doesn't do a dramatic change.

Not very clear, I find focussing difficult these days.

It all depends on your soil as to what colour flowers you get in hydrangeas.
You can adjust the soil pH to influence flower color. Adding aluminum sulfate can lower the pH and make the flowers blue, while adding lime can raise the pH and make the flowers pink.
To technical for me so I just leave mine to do as they like, I think the dry season isn’t helping the garden with pests as my daughter sent me a picture of her lupins and they was riddled with aphids, she was saying I can’t spray them as I have about 10 or so ladybirds on there munching them.

They call them colour-change on QVC!
I've taken a photo but again, it won't load on here.
Maybe this is the explanation.

There are specific varieties though, the pub where I had my birthday meal has a spectacular hydrangea bush in the garden that has multiple colours, (is not grafted), I believe there are variegated varieties developed in Japan and Korea. This is part of a list of varieties ...

I'm having problems, it will only accept this as a thumbnail. If I choose full image, it opens on its own in another version of Breedia!

@CaroleC - is this any help?

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Thank you @Malka.
I don't know how I manage to have so many problems. I store a lot of info, it maybe due to low memory.

How often do you do a disk-cleanup and defrag?

I used to do that on the pc and used a clean up on my phone last week. This device is a tablet, (Amazon, android), and I don't know whether it has those features. I could try downloading the app that is on my phone.

I've disabled one or two things - including Alexa which keeps turning itself back on. I moved some info to the cloud, and switched off and on. I'm sure I have cleared the cache before but I couldn't find it this time.
It might be a little sharper, I'll see how it goes. Thanks for the prompt.

Those hydrangeas are very pretty @CaroleC

Last night Aunt C and I went to see the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band perform. I've loved them since I was a kid. In fact, the day after my 21st birthday I saw them at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. I was able to get their autographs after the show (they were doing 2 shows a night for a week) and Jimmy Fadden's birthday is the day before mine. After the show, I decided I wanted to see them again, so I went again mid-week. Talked to Jimmy again and he was saying how much they liked the mid-performance shows because the critics didn't usually show and they could play something other than the greatest hits. I asked him if they would play Daddy Was a Sailor. He was really surprised I knew that and asked for it (he wrote it) but said they hadn't played it in so long that they couldn't remember how...

So, fast forward 39 years and at a quite moment I yelled out Daddy Was a Sailor. Jeff Hanna (the lead singer) looked over at me and laughed and said "that's a great song. We haven't done that in years. I don't think anyone remembers how".

What???? I gave them 39 years to pull that song out and put it back in their repertoire!!

It was a great show - they did pull out The Fish Song which was another great Fadden song.

On the way to the show, I had Aunt C listen to one of their earliest songs. She just discovered them by chance recently. Didn't know that I lived and breathed them. They started as a jug band - playing stuff like Happy Fat Annie, Coney Island Washboard, Hard Hearted Hannah, etc - stuff way older than them! * So I played her this:

*when my Mom heard these songs coming from my bedroom, she called me out in the hall and started digging in the closet. She pulled out a record case filled with old 78s and there were a lot of the songs I was listening to by the original artists. It was pretty cool.

@CaroleC I have an Amazon tablet too. They recently made a lot of changes as to how things are stored. They moved all my photos to the cloud so now if I want to upload a photo here, I have to go online and download the photo to the tablet and then click upload a file and look in "recents" for the photo. After a while, the photo drops off the recent list and it won't open at all (the new Gallery photo viewer only shows photos taken by the tablet), so I have to download it again so it will appear in Recents again.

I've had multiple photos refuse to upload here.

So it is likely not something you are failing to do but just the way Amazon has changed things plus glitches on this website that Azz hasn't fixed as he tries to combine everything.

Thanks for that Toed.
I've heard the name Nitty Gritty Dirt Band but can't recall anything by them. My grannie had the original, (shellac), record of Teddy Bears Picnic. Sung very slowly by some 30's crooner. The song always takes me back to being a pre-teen.
I'm glad that you both enjoyed the gig.

They've been around for 60 years. Their biggest hit was probably Mr Bojangles followed by An American Dream.

In the early-mid 70s, they went to Nashville and did a 3-record album called Will the Circle Be Unbroken. They brought in so many of the old American country/bluegrass artists (Mother Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson) and just backed those artists up while they recorded their biggest hits. That album made them in a way I don't think any other artist has ever experienced. It made them musician's musicians and THE backdrop for American music (aka country, bluegrass, gospel, etc). They earned the respect of the artists who brought that music out of the appalachians - all while sporting long hair, beards, jeans and mismatched socks - and brought that music to a new generation who had poohpoohed it as their grandpa's old fogey music.

Funny about Teddy Bear's Picnic. Might have been Henry Hall on that record.

That's the one! I think the vocalist might have been Alan Dale. My OH's father was a part-time session drummer many years ago. Chas said that he once filled in with the Henry Hall Orchestra.