Some of the current blooming daylilies

There a lot of new blooms in the garden this week. Here are a couple of my more colorful day lilies. They're not re-bloomers like some of the yellow varieties like Stella D'oro, but their beautiful color makes up for their short bloom time.

Today was a mixture of gardening jobs - planting a bunch of parsley seedlings, weeding,  feeding potatoes, sprinkling blood meal all around to fend off some critters, picking some black raspberries and the first bush beans and  resting in between enjoying Wimbledon. This afternoon I made a huge batch of potato salad for tonight's dinner and porch sitting with friends tomorrow night, and there went the better part of the day.

Some critter or critters have eaten some tops and lots of stems off many of my tomatoes as well as de-nuding one of my potato plants and been munching on my bush beans, and beet tops. I don't know if it's deer (saw about 5 or 6 of them behind the house a couple of days ago), or the ground hog I caught running away from one of the vegetable beds a couple of days ago. I also spotted a big grasshopper, who may also be one of the munchers.This year has been a particularly bad one for every kind of crawling, flying and walking critters helping themselves to our veggies.

Tomorrow morning, while it's cool enough to be out there, I'll try to mix up some of my pepper spray and get it on some of these veggies. Hopefully it will make them a lot less appetizing to the free loaders!