* Red salvia = good. I’d never tried these annuals before. My experience with annuals has been pretty limited, since I have a spotty track record of keeping them properly watered. But these guys are definitely on my must-buy list for next year. Even when I neglected them, I could practically watch them bounce back and perk up after I watered them. Bonus: It’s actually better to not remove the spent blooms and seeds, because the seeds attract goldfinches—something I never knew. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been watching whole families of finches devour the seeds from the salvia on the patio. One of my favorite moments was watching a male and female perch on stems on opposite sides of the pot, bending the stems parallel to the ground, just hanging out and gazing out at the yard. Poetry.

• Cigar plant = deer magnet. I strolled right past this little novelty item at the garden center in spring, because the fools wanted $25 for a hanging basket. “They’ll attract hummingbirds!” the clerk trilled. I thought, hmm, not at that price. Waited until July, when I found a much-cheaper batch in flats and figured I’d give them a go. The hummingbirds stayed away in droves, but this funky little plant did attract marauding deer, which boldly marched right up onto my patio, skirting a multitude of rocks, pots, solar lights and a birdbath to get at them. Chomped them down to pathetic little stubs. They aren’t even that pretty!

• Clear plastic is useless for weed control. One of our neighbors has an ugly, weed-infested strip of yard that abuts the railroad ties at the back of one of our garden beds. Two months ago, they apparently decided to deal with it—by covering the whole mess with clear plastic and weighting it down with bags of mulch. I’ve been watching with interest, wondering if clear plastic could possibly work as well as black. It doesn’t. This project now resembles nothing so much as a terrarium, with the weeds utterly unchecked, growing happily under a condensation-coated sheet of plastic. Why wouldn’t they? They’re getting sunlight and plenty of moisture, and the edges of the plastic aren’t secured, so they’re getting plenty of air, too.

• Red geraniums attract hummingbirds. I’ve had geraniums before, but I’ve never seem hummingbirds come to them until this year—maybe because they were in a hanging basket. I’m trying this again next year, and this time putting the basket in a spot that’s more visible. My husband had a prime vantage point from his favorite chair. I rarely get to sit in his favorite chair.

Honestly, I can’t remember a summer in the past 20 years that has been less hospitable for gardening. First it was the mosquitoes. Then it was the torrential rains that left much of my yard a swamp, thus generating even more mosquitoes. Then it was the invasion of pesky little taupe-colored moths, which flushed from the grass and shrubbery at the slightest touch. Then it was the Invasion of the Monster Insects. I’ve spotted a 4-inch praying mantis (I know it’s harmless, but yeesh), some enormous winged insects hanging out menacingly in the driveway (the kind of thing waaay too big to step on), and other unidentified beastly hard-shelled things stuck in spiderwebs. The anthills in the backyard have multiplied and spread alarmingly. Friend of TT Vickie suggests blasting the hills with malathion, but I just can’t go there.

Our yard service guys say they can take care of all this for a couple hundred bucks. But we’ve gotten this far into summer; I can’t see us dropping that kind of change. It’s not like we entertain in the backyard on a regular basis. And if we had that kind of spare cash lying around, I’d put it toward repairing something we could appreciate year-round, like ripping out the water-damaged wallpaper in the master bedroom and patching up the drywall underneath it.

The mosquitoes show no signs whatsoever of giving us a break. We’re loath to use a lot of chemicals around here, but even my husband had enough when he had to fight his way through a cloud of skeeters to get from his car to our front door, a trip of perhaps a dozen steps. He grabbed a can of repellent we hadn’t used since our elder son’s graduation party in 2009 and went nuts. I couldn’t blame him.

The only gardening chore I’ve been able to manage in these godawful conditions is keeping the pots of annuals watered, and even that requires a lot of breath-holding and/or chuffing air out through my nose to keep mosquitoes from flying up my nostrils. Watering takes maybe 10 minutes, and that is just about precisely how long I can stand to be outside in my own damn yard.

These Cambodia-like conditions have everything growing like crazy, of course, including the weeds. The bed I cleaned out for transplanted hostas and daylilies under the apple tree last year is now sporting knee-high junk that needs to go, but it’s also in the wettest part of the garden, where the skeeters are at their most bloodthirsty. I’m hoping for a cold snap that kills the little varmints so I can get something accomplished out there before the snow flies.

That’s what happened with a little bed I started in a spot at the corner of the garage. We’d removed a ginormous yew that had been carefully trimmed over the years into a cone. Problem was, the uppermost point of the yew had grown beyond the gutters, and no clever finagling with a ladder could get me anywhere near it. Have you ever seen a 12-foot conically shaped yew that’s pruned up only for the first 8 to 10 feet? Pretty it isn’t. Out it went.

We were left with a generally rounded spot covered with heaps of volcanic rock, with black landscaping plastic underneath. I started with the hole where the tree had been, pulled away as much of the landscape cloth as possible, transplanted some of the daylilies I’d dug up and divided, and waited for them to get busy. They did come up, although only a couple flowered. I just sighed and hoped they’d do better next year.

Then Mother Nature threw me a bone: Volunteer musk mallows. I’d transplanted a few daylilies from our old place, and that garden was rife with musk mallows, so some of the seeds must have migrated along with the daylilies. While these flowers are pretty enough (they’re related to hibiscus and hollyhocks, but with much smaller, pale pink flowers), they spread like virulent weeds. My previous garden was one long, continuous bed, and I had to weed out the volunteer mallows like a zealot (and yank up seedlings in spring) to keep them from taking over.

This spot, though? Golden! Nothing around them but daylilies, which bloom earlier (so we’d have that staged-bloom thing going on); weed treatments applied to the lawn would halt their spread there. Yesterday they bloomed, delicate little pale things I found I could actually appreciate. I should take a picture, I thought.

Today I went outside to do just that, and guess what? Flower tops snapped clean off. Frigging deer. As if they don’t get enough yuks from eating my hostas and head-butting my bird feeders. But I’m still hopeful. In a rose mallow vs. deer smackdown, my money’s on the rose mallow.

Those of you who’ve found this site through my bff’s blog may already have read a brief synopsis of last night’s water woes. It was a storm of biblical proportions, the sort of relentless pounding that makes you wonder: Is God smiting me? If so, why? And will the sump pump hold?

I was feeling pretty darn smug when news of a tornado sent us scurrying to the basement. Just 10 miles north of us, cars were floating away in flash floods, drivers stranded on the freeway were fleeing the floodwaters by swimming their way out (or turning their cars around and going the wrong way to head back to the nearest on-ramp), tornado sirens were wailing in every direction. But our basement was dry! I silently congratulated myself on the mudjacking, concrete patching and window-well improvements. We’d be fine.

Less than two hours later, water was seeping in from almost every corner, the window wells were filled to the brim, and my plucky sons were bailing them out in the middle of a fierce electrical storm while I manned the mops, towels and broom in the basement. I don’t have a rain gauge, but I know the first surge brought at least 6 inches of rain in under two hours, because that’s what was in my (previously empty) watering pitcher. The boys spent two hours bailing the window wells, moved rocks and sheets of plexiglass around to better protect them, then began bailing water from the patio, which was ankle deep. (Mr. TrowelTART was otherwise occupied at the newspaper, which needed all hands on deck in a major way.)

The rain had tapered off by about 11 p.m., when the boys called it a night and decided to hit the showers. Then it started raining again…and continued until this morning. That second surge brought another two inches or so. It cleared up and got beastly hot and humid mid-morning, and the ground is much drier than I expected, but now we’re bracing for another round of storms expected to drop another 2 or 3 inches by morning.

And yet, I can’t really complain. It’s a nuisance, but we didn’t lose a car, as one friend did, or have to stay up until 3:30 this morning bailing out the sump pump, as another did. We weren’t struck by lightning, as two sisters were last night while walking home from a restaurant; one is in a coma, the other in critical condition. Our car wasn’t swallowed by a sinkhole, the fate suffered by an Escalade driver who was fished out by a good Samaritan. (At this writing, the car is still in the hole, engine running; there are live electric wires around it.) We did not see our basement windows blown out by the force of floodwaters, or our kids’ high school locker room turned into a 5-foot-deep pool littered with football equipment. We’re all safe and sound. Sore and tired and mentally spent, but safe and sound.

As for the garden, I can muster only a passing twinge of curiosity about what this deluge will mean long-term. The raspberries were unusually sweet today, and the impatiens are blooming like mad. Whatever else happens, we’ll deal with as it comes.

I’ve been reluctant to take any photos of the rocky front garden bed because, well, I expected it to look much better by now. My little village planted a series of water-filtering median strips after a construction project last summer, and those beds look fabulous, as if they’ve been there forever. Maybe I should give my six readers a photo of them instead. And maybe I will.

But for now, this is my work-in-progress. It remains an ongoing surprise/learning experience. The things I’ve planted here expecting great things have been big disappointments—I’m thinking daylilies and hostas, about which the best I can say is: They aren’t dead yet. I’m perplexed by the yarrow as well; I planted a couple of those smack in the middle of the bed, at its highest point, since these plants can get pretty tall. They have formed a dense clump that looks vigorous and healthy—but they’ve remained much, much shorter than their counterparts elsewhere, which are in the shade and flop over helplessly after they bloom. These yarrows, in a perfect spot for their kind—hot and dry—have yet to produce a single flower. What the?

But since I’m a glass-half-full kind of girl, I’m happy with the cosmos, which are doing a great job of filling in the empty spaces in the back of the bed. Even better, they haven’t cost me a dime since I bought them two or three years ago; they just keep reseeding themselves.

Mr. TrowelTART noted the other day that rain has been sparse lately, and suggested this bed might need a good dousing. “Are you kidding me?” I said, incredulous. He seemed surprised by the vehemence of my response and reasonably suggested that our teenage boys could do it. “Forget it,” I said. This is a survival-of-the-fittest garden. I have enough trouble keeping my potted plants alive; my goal is to do nothing with this bed except weed it — and continue the search for plants that will tolerate that.

I am a big, big believer in gardening on the cheap, which means I divide any perennials that will tolerate it. Which is most of them. But sometimes…well, it doesn’t work out exactly as planned. See evidence at left. Can you find the hostas?

Last summer, this was a bed of badly crowded daylilies, and not even particularly pretty ones, just your garden-variety (sorry) orange ditch lilies. But whatever. They weren’t blooming here, just taking up space, and I had some bare spots here and there, so I spent backbreaking hours digging, dividing, replanting. When I was finished, this little spot had just a handful of daylilies left next to the fence, leaving lots of lovely bare ground in which to plant the hostas I bought (and divided) at the end of the season.

I could see the hostas were in trouble by the end of May. Here’s a more recent shot, taken just a few days ago:

Granted, this is from a different angle, but trust me: The hostas aren’t any more visible when you’re looking at this bed straight-on. Which leads me to wonder: WTF? And the daylilies still didn’t bloom.

So now what? There’s no way I’m wading in and digging the rest of these suckers out; the ones I transplanted didn’t do that well, either, so the hell with that. My inclination is to just yank out the foliage, maybe on a really wet day when some of the roots will come up with the leaves, and at least give the hostas some space to breathe. As for the daylilies I planted in other parts of the yard, they have one more season to redeem themselves. So much for daylilies thriving anywhere.

Oh, and I’d just like to say: The mosquitoes this year? Brutal. I braved the raspberry patch for 10 minutes last night—I cannot let them go to waste!—and ended up with so many bites I looked like a damn leper. I took a quick shower, but the itching was so unbearable I needed a Benadryl to calm it enough for me to sleep. Worst of all, I had a bite under one eye. Nothing you can do about that.

Tonight, during a lull between tornado warnings and flood watches, I took advantage of the slightly cooler temps to weed the front garden bed, which is in a less-verdant part of the yard and has fewer places for skeeters to hide. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And now I have a mosquito bite on my eyelid. Anybody know of a mosquito repellent that will keep these things away from my face? At this point, I’m desperate enough to try just about anything. A necklace of garlic cloves? Mustard plaster? I’m all ears.

If I had the stomach for it, I would keep track of the time I spend every year trimming back this tree and seven others like it. Four are parked rightupnextto the house; the others are in front of a fence. It’s pretty obvious that the previous owner—let’s call her Betty—wanted vertical elements in these spots. Along the house, they make a certain amount of sense, because they break up an otherwise extremely dull expanse of siding. But couldn’t she have picked something that would’ve been vertical and a little less labor-intensive?

Our first summer here, I puzzled over these things for a long time, trying to figure out how to prune them. There is no central trunk; rather, there are dozens of stems, most of them dead, around which Betty apparently painstakingly threaded and twined the shoots of new growth. The trunks—for want of a better term—are tangled and interwoven in a way that is utterly confounding. And since most of the wood in the middle is dead, the new shoots tend to flop over, making a godawful mess that is absolute hell to cut back. I never know where to start. And it’s such a big job (the by-the-house trees were already above the soffits in mid-May) that I can never manage to cut all the trees in a single day, which means they never match. Something’s always too short, too sparse, or too overgrown.

This year I decided on draconian measures and just cut the hell out of them, lopping all of them from 10-12 feet down to about 6. I finished the last one, shown above, this afternoon. Yes, it looks sparse. But so did its brothers around the corner when I hacked them back less than a month ago. And just look at ‘em now:

They already need trimming again. Feh!

To add insult to injury, when I came inside to recuperate, I felt a bug crawling on my neck. I brushed it away, and it fell right into my cleavage—never a good thing. I fished it out and it fell into our plush new carpet, where it burrowed like a mother. I finally extracted it, with some difficulty…and it was a Japanese beetle. I’d noticed holes in the tree’s leaves when I was trimming but didn’t think much about it, because frankly I just don’t care. Stupid high-maintenance tree.

So now I have a dilemma: Try to get rid of the beetles, or just let nature take its course? I know, I know: Japanese beetles + landscape plants = bad. But I’m telling you, it’s extremely tempting to just stand back and let the dominant species win.

I’m testing a solar-powered birdbath fountain for work, and was near the end of my rope with it until I realized my existing birdbath was too shallow. (The old one is a terra cotta plant dish with a lovely mosaic pattern and perched on top of a pot—sort of like this birdbath, except my pot base isn’t nearly as pretty.)

The fountain worked when I tested it in a big soup kettle, bubbling like crazy—so it was off to Wild Birds Unlimited to find a properly deep birdbath. It’s now set up at the edge of the patio, the fountain is burbling soothingly, and I’m just waiting for the birds to find it. Wish I had a picture for you, but when I picked my camera up, it was strangely light. My kids had once again pilfered the batteries—which I just recharged two days ago, on my own charger; hmpf! They think juice for their Wii controllers is more important than providing photos for my blog. They are wrong.

I’m convinced the birds know there’s some new toy out there for them, because the birdsong level got louder and considerably more excited as soon as the fountain kicked in. The racket out there is ridiculous. And I just refilled the feeder in the adjacent lilac, so we should have bathers any time now. (And if you’re wondering whether birdbaths attract mosquitoes, they don’t if the water’s moving. There are products you can buy—like Mosquito Dunks —to keep skeeters from breeding in birdbaths, ponds and other water features, but I won’t be needing those. Heh.)

While I was admiring the fountain, I noticed activity in a birdhouse in the same lilac. I put it up last spring and the birds studiously ignored it. But it’s pretty—ceramic, cobalt blue, with nice curvy lines—and I enjoy just looking at it, whether the birds use it or not, so I left it in the same spot. Now a bird couple—jenny wrens, I think—are building a nest there. One brings impossibly long twigs to the opening and jams them in while the other hovers and chirps encouragingly. (Or bossily, if you’re the glass-half-empty misogynistic type.) Some of the twigs were at least a foot long, and most of those ended up on the ground, but you’ve gotta give the bird points for effort. It looked like a tightrope walker maneuvering a balancing pole.

All of the above adds up to sweet solace on a day when I also discovered the deer finally did find and ingest my single red rose. (A clean cut on the stem, and not a rose petal in sight.) Ah, well. One nice thing about having a big yard with lots of attendant wildlife: For every minor disappointment, there’s a new marvel to take its place.

It blooms! Wonder of wonders. Now if I can just get this sucker to climb and keep blooming. But even if this is the only rose I see all summer, I’ll be happy. It stood up to yet another torrential thunderstorm last night—the kind that leaves you quaking in bed at 4 a.m., counting the seconds between the flash that lights up the entire bedroom and the piercing thunderclap that follows. A huge limb came down in the side yard and the two honey locusts dropped smaller branches everywhere, and the normally dry swale separating our backyard from the neighbors’ looked like a swollen creek. But the rose is still there. It’s my little miracle.

Raspberry harvest is picking up, too. I got eight edible berries today and had to toss only two. An 80 percent success rate, compared to yesterday’s discouraging 33 percent. Gotta love those numbers.

Did a little weeding last night before the storms moved in, but didn’t last long. The wild strawberries are back in an area I’d completely cleaned out just a few weeks ago—attention must be paid!—but I could stomach only about 20 minutes before heading back inside. Even the slightest movement stirs up a cloud of mosquitoes and other biting nuisances. Our lawn guys recommended an insecticide application this year to get rid of the anthills in the yard—I’m convinced our entire community is built on one monstrous anthill—and tamp down the mosquito population in all the plants and shrubbery. We’ve never even contemplated such a move before; we tend to be anti-chemical, and in previous summers, we’ve just mowed around the anthills and dealt with the skeeters by using a mosquito lantern. But, as we know, this summer is not going to be like the previous ones. It’s us or them.

I do want to give a shout-out to my patio mosquito solution, however. It’s called ThermaCELL (available at your friendly neighborhood Target) and it’s a marvel—a small lantern powered by a butane cartridge. The wick inside is lit with the push of a button, and the heat rises to the top, where it activates a small blue pad that emits a slow, long-lasting dose of repellent that keeps the skeeters at bay within a 15-square-foot area. There’s no flame, no smell, no batteries or extension cords, nothing scary to slather on your skin, and it works. Smaller hand-held models can be used in the garden…which is probably what I ought to be doing.

Let the record show this is the first raspberry of summer. I hope the photo is sharp enough, because I can’t take another one; the goal was to document the first ripe fruit, and I already ate it. The total take was just a half-dozen or so, but it’s only the beginning. Raspberries in my cereal! Raspberries for breakfast! Raspberry pie! Couldn’t be happier.

To tell the truth, I enjoy the harvest as much as the eating. Picking raspberries is an exercise in patience, not one of my top-tier traits. You can’t pick too fast or you’ll drop the fruit. You can’t tromp into the bed with guns blazing or you’ll trample the canes. You can’t pinch off berries that aren’t really ready to be picked; you’ll either squash them or drop them, or both. It takes forever to get a bowlful, and that’s okay with me. During berry-picking season, the time I spend with the raspberries is probably the sanest part of my day.

It was a little disconcerting to have to throw two of the berries back to the birds because of moldy spots. Very few berries showed mold last year, but we’ve had an unusually wet spring and summer this year. So maybe this crop will need more picking-over than usual. But that’s okay. Any and all extra effort is absolutely worth the reward.