Since we were going on vacation for a little while Patrick’s mom volunteered to come by the house to water our plants so they wouldn’t die while we were gone. Naturally other items continued to grow as well though…

The neighbor’s unstoppable kudzu managed to get all the way to our house!

The Hosta’s look like they grew quite a bit – one of them even grew flowers! And the Red Fountain Grass must have gotten somewhat of a beating from thunderstorms – usually it perks back up, but this time it appears to be permanently down. We’ll have to tie them together or something so they won’t stay so droopy. (Compare to pre-vacation photo)

The sunflowers were such a success. Yeah…well…or not really. Next time I’ll know better than to plant sunflower seeds on a west-facing wall. Those sunflowers took one beating after another. Some of them were doing alright in the beginning (See photo), but every time it rained those poor fragile little plants were beaten to the ground. Plus the ones facing north must not have received enough sunlight because they slowly but surely shriveled up. The only ones really going anywhere where the southern-most ones…and even though a few of them are at least blooming they’re not exactly standing up tall and strong! Like I said, I’ll know better next time…

Aaaaand the lavender. My sweet, sweet lavender. We’ve gone through a bit with these little ones too. Originally we had planted them in our “pond” spot where the Hosta’s are now located (See photo). We transplanted them to this (above) location because the area is much, much drier. The one on the left was the “Hidcote” variety that I had picked out; the one on the right was the “Sweet” variety that Patrick had picked.

Now that we returned from vacation I was sad to see that my poor lavender didn’t make it. Perhaps we had transplanted it too late? Unfortunately it had to go to plant heaven.

They still had some lavender’s left at Lowe’s, so we planted the “Province” variety that we also have at the front of the house.

We added some more flowers at the front of the house. Earlier we had planted the Japanese Boxwoods and some yellow annual flowers. Patrick’s mom forgot to water this flower bed, so one of the boxwood’s isn’t doing to well and we’re considering replacing it (the others seem to be doing ok after watering). Funnily enough the annuals grew bigger than the boxwood’s – perhaps because the rain still hits them but not the boxwood’s behind (See previous photo). We’ve added these white “Mum’s” because they’re quite beautiful and because they’re perennial’s. That way when the yellow annuals die the Mum’s will be there to keep the flower bed green.

And lastly we have a new buddy around the house. To our shock our right-side neighbors had moved out while we were gone. They had only moved in in April, so we didn’t expect them to be gone when we got back. Unfortunately they have abandoned their two cats – momma cat and her teenager (born right around the time when the neighbor’s moved in). To make things worse we discovered that momma cat is expecting again. We are considering keeping the little teenager (above) around, but are not up for the task of keeping mom and her soon to be family additions. We’ve tried to contact animal rescue place after animal rescue place, but they are either full or claiming they can’t accept cats and to go through the city’s animal shelter instead. We’ve been hesitant to call the animal shelter because we know they put cats to sleep if they don’t get adopted within a certain time frame and we can’t bear the thought of that. So we’re in somewhat of a dilemma about what to do with this abandoned pregnant cat. :(