We could use a little more rain this month but overall, I have absolutely no complaints. Several farm projects are coming along nicely (I keep forgetting to take the camera out to document it all), the girls are enjoying their summer vacation, and Nancy is – thanks to a downsized boarding operation – able to spend more time doing what she loves: training Dressage horses.

I’ve mentioned the Cahas Green development in previous blog entries. The subdivision is visible in the photo down in the valley at right. If you enlarge the photo above you can see the next home construction in progress. They’ve got the basement poured and it looks like they’ll be framing before long. The new homeowners are horse folks; I believe they left a message for us yesterday concerning access to our indoor/outdoor riding arenas. It’s exciting to have more riders relocating to our area and I look forward to meeting them in person!

I picked up a total of four cubic yards of red mulch from Hilltop Mulch in Rocky Mount this week and made some more progress with our “secret garden”. Hilltop is a great place to get mulch, decorative stone, turf supplies, and a variety of trees and shrubs. I paid $20 a scoop (half yard) for the red mulch, and $30 for a scoop of brown stone. f you’re in my area, they’re off Wirtz Road, about a mile from the Route 220 and Wirtz Road intersection.

It hit 95F here on Saturday (100F heat index according to my weather station) so I was drinking water at a rate of about a gallon an hour. In the photo above I’m reminded that I still need to finish painting the planters. I gave the foreground planters a fresh coat recently but I’ve got seven more to go including the two in the background. The color of the painted wood used in our landscaping is Lowes Olympic’s Soft Ivory. I have them mix it with semi-gloss exterior oil paint, which holds up really well outside.

The lawn is looking much better. It’s nothing to write home about unless of course you saw just how dead it was during the drought last year. Last September I overseeded with bluegrass and it established better than I expected. This September I may overseed with some fescue, depending on how the bluegrass tolerates the heat.

It’s hard to see from this picture but our two rhododendrons that hide behind the Japanese Maple and the Japanese Andromedas are flowering. These guys flower about a month behind schedule due to their cool and heavily shaded nook. In 2006 I gave them about a 5’ tall haircut, and of course they reacted in 2007 by not flowering at all!

The keen eye will observe a small dark circle 1’ below the window at right in the photo above. That is where a hose bib protruded from the brick wall until yesterday, when it blew right out of the wall – along with an 8” threaded pipe) as I tried to turn it off. A sideways fountain sprung from the brick as I sprinted into the house, down into the basement and into the mechanical room to shut down the main valve for all of our hose bibs! So instead of mowing this Sunday morning, I’ll be cutting out some drywall in the basement stairway exterior wall and installing a brand new hose bib.