Quite a lot right looks bad at the moment.  The perennials are at the end of their blooms and I didn't get any annuals planted in time to take over.  Part of it was my fault, but the weather has been strange - cold, hot, then in the 50s.

The delphiniums were the worst, with all but one getting what seems to have been some kind of wilt.  I am still planting things I've found at the last minute, petunias plus the things that didn't get planted before - it's hot and muggy today.  PA has been cold and damp so the plants I've chosen for hot, dry weather haven't all been too pleased.

How's everyone else doing?

Rabbits have been at the basil.....

Then I'm glad I didn't buy any!  I had thought that dark kind was so pretty that I'd been tempted to put it at the cemetery but it was expensive.  You never know what will bother things there.

Our yard has bunnies (and moles and who knows what else).  At least the dog did catch a mole :)  They are a big problem.

What is looking the worst in my garden is the yarrow.  I actually yanked a bunch of it out today, since it traveled to the front of one of my beds.  The weeds aren't looking particulary nice either....

My veggies aren't producing fruit.  The beans and tomatoes produced a ton of flowers but no fruit!  The plant looks healthy otherwise, nice and leafy and a rich green color.. My okra grew to about 15 inches then just stopped.  Last year they did really well after a rough start so I don't know why they just stopped growing.  I started the tomatoes from seeds and shared the excess with neighbors and they are having the same problem with those plants, many flowers but very little (or no) fruit.

I've got some  morning glories and moonflowers growning on a trellis out in the front and the plants have grown well and covered the trellis (and went beyond!) but it doesn't have a single flower on it!  There are some anoles that hang around it and they like it.  I really would like for it to flower though. 

It's been so cold and damp here that nothing's doing very well, even if we weren't way behind.

Now I do have lots of yarrow!  I got suckered into buying "Pretty Belinda" at Lowes last year because I always need pink in my one bed.  Last year it bleached out to nearly white.  This year it's been holding its color (no sun?) but it looks like it's going to be an invasive one.  I pulled a bunch earlier. 

The other bed has "Paprika," "Coronation Gold" and one that I'd hoped would blend with the "Paprika."  They are all doing fine, but wow!  At dusk that bed is hurting my eyes.  I now know the meaning of "sulphur yellow."  The new yarrow came out later than Paprika and is orangish-yellow, like Butterfly plants.  It seems like a very nice yarrow but it looks like h with the Paprika which is very red this year.  Something has to go there.  For some reason it looks much worse in a dim light.  Some garish red petunias and coleus, plus a matching yellow viola aren't exactly helping.

Maybe in 3-4 months some of my annuals will bloom ;)  (This is Pennsylvania.)

 My mail box sits in a half wine barrel and every year I load it up with different annuals & a few morning glory vines.  This year something (chipmunks?) are constantly digging & tunneling through the dirt.  I refill the holes every day, but the plants have been torn into a little too often & are not doing well.  I'm just going to pull them out and be done with it. If the neighbors look out the window, they'll probably think I've gone off the deep end because everytime I go out to get my mail I'll start stomping on the dirt with my slippers and yelling things like "I give up!" and of course no one else is around.

Moles and voles make tunnels too.  I keep finding holes in my flower bed and we stick a rock in the hole.  This doesn't work at all but we both do it :)  The dog caught a big mole in the asparagus bed and was dubbed Good Dog (per DH) that day. 

That's too bad about the mailbox.  Ours is a mess but years ago I was a sub mail carrier and I know a few people did have theirs nice.  We have lots of chipmunks, but since they are usually near the woods and birdfeeders, I don't know if they'd be the culprits or not.  Our flower problems seem to be those moles. 

Actually the castor bean people sell broken ones that they say will poison them, but I'm kind of leery of that with the dog and cats.  (I turned into my mother and planted some castor beans this year.)

Everything but the weeds looks bad in my garden!  It got too hot too fast for my tomatoes, and the three tomatoes I did have sprout, two got eaten by birds before I thought they were ripe enough to pick - so all I got was one underripe tomato, and a few cherry tomatoes with tough skin.  Hopefully I'll keep the plants alive long enough for a fall tomato harvest!

The (volunteer) lemon balm also spread out and blocked the sun from my basil plants, and the peppers are just stunted this year for some reason.

All my lilies have bloomed and I am now looking at bare stalks - I hate that. My Stella D'oro lilies are also bare - but they will usually flower one more time. I did plant some zinnias from seed late this year and they have only just started blooming - I'm a little bummed because I choose a Burpee seed mix  that promised a combo of magenta and chartreuse (a lght green) and so far there  dozens of  large magentas but not one green. 

I've had 2 cherry tomatoes, also with tough skin.  For some reason 1 catmint is very yellow and it's in the same bed as the other one that looks fine. 

We checked the one cemetery tonight and the alyssum is still being eaten like crazy.  It's a shame because I planted a lot of it.  Something has even taken bites out of the zinnias there.  It's my first year for them and I got them in late although considering the cold, i don't know if it would have made much difference.  They've started  to bloom at the cemetery and the white ones are really pale yellow.  I don't know how the orange will look.  Something even chewed up the Salvia (Marcus) I planted there.

I spent some time cutting off yarrow and staking some ones that are flopping.

The asparagus bed is one of the more attractive features - I don't think that's a good thing.  (I think the Stella d'Oro's are still going here though, although they look like they need trimmed.)

ETA:  The Stellas are basically done and Jap. beetles are eating a salvia.  Who knew?  I don't know what's eating the one at the cemetery though.  I need to get more of those tomato rings for the yarrow.  My husband was so sure they wouldn't work that he only bought 1.

The hostas are done for the season and need to be cut back, the petunias have gone willowy on me, and the yarrow needs some aggressive tending to.  But my carnations, marigolds, hollyhocks and gerberas still look really good!  The felicia went crazy this year, but I think it is just about through sending forth its blue daisy-like flowers.

The weeds?  They look terrific!

I am just waiting for frost now but it hasn't come yet.  You can tell which way the wind has been blowing outside by the way the nicotiana and tall marigolds are leaning.  The Merlin Blue Morn petunias are lanky but still blooming.  They are an odd color, neither quite blue nor purple.  I might as well have planted Queen's Anne's Lace as cosmos out in my flower bed.  It would have probably looked better.

I've been busy taking and rooting coleus cuttings to try to over winter them.  I wasn't going to do it but I may need them for my new planters.  I'm sick of them already.

If I don't go near things, they don't look as bad.  Hawaii Blue ageratum is still blooming, white Profusion Zinnias, tall single striped marigolds, and what is think was Evolution salvia.  That did very well.

The castor beans are still standing although the winds from Gustav knocked down some trees.  Hmm.  Autumn Joy sedum is doing its thing - probably trying to tell me something.

I started "The Essential Earthman" by Henry Mitchell when our electricity went out and highly recommend it as enjoyable gardening reading.

The chickweed was amazing the last time I checked on it ;-)

We started our tomatoes about 10 days later than usual and now my vines are loaded with very large, but still green tomatoes.  We keep expecting a frost but I'm hoping some tomatoes will ripen before then.  In my flower garden, the only thing going great are the zinnias. Everything else looks tired & wilted.

Bettyjean,

About.com seems to cover the green tomato issue fairly well.  I remembered brining them in and covering them with newspaper in the basement (I think).

http://gardening.about.com/od/growingtips/qt/Green_Tomato.htm

My folks ate fried green tomatoes but they always looked yucky to me so I can't report on that one.  DH has never mentioned them so I don't know if his family had them or not.  Either they didn't or he never missed them :)

It is frustrating to have something get going good and then have it frost.  It still hasn't frosted, but everything looks cold.

Normally I have very good luck with green beans and peas but this year it seemed like some type of beetle was at those plants.  I got a small crop from them but I ended up just pulling them up because I didn't want the beetle to spread to the other plants. 

I had a ton of tomatoes, lettuce, and carrots.  This was our first year of planting carrots and we were pleasantly surprised.  I even planted a second crop in July and are just using the carrots to eat now.  I have added a layer of mulch over them to try and help preserve them with the frost until we can use them. 

Sadly we still had no luck with zucchini again this year.  The plants stayed very small, flowered a bit and the zuchinnis were more like the size of pickles and just never got any bigger.  I know some folks have zuchinni coming out of the ears but not me. 

We are hoping to expand our garden for next year so I need to research a bit more to help my struggling zuchinni, beans and peas. 

We had brussels sprouts but they were small.  I wonder if I could grow just one zuchhini somewhere.  I like to get them small and stir fry them and DH would stick them in the garden where it was all weeds and you wouldn't see them.  He doesn't grow them. 

We didn't try much of a vegetable garden but it was a bad year anyway.  My striped marigolds did very well and so did the orange profusion zinnias at the cemetery.  DH said the alyssum was looking good there.  That's funny because something had been eating it earlier in the year and I hadn't planned on planting it again.

I have no idea what to put with orange zinnias on a grave!  It's amazing that anything did well there.  Most things have frosted here.

    Diana ,

        I love Perrinals also i my flower garden . I generally get plants that I know the bees are not fond of , so that way I can work in the flower bed .But right now with it being colder out , my flower bed is pretty much done for till next year .

                                                                    Dolores H.

Dolores,

That's a good idea about the bees.  My thymes were nice this year but they did attract a lot of bees so I had to wait sometimes if I felt up to working on that bed.  Still, we have had some problems with the honey bees being scarce.  Of course, they sure weren't all honey bees! 

Everything is done here and it has frosted.  We had a couple of batches of brussel sprouts and then the sheep got in the garden - goodbye brussel sprouts! 

The seed catalogs are coming though :o)