Today's happenings

Random things around here.

First of all, the cows have a couple of lady visitors; Cliff's brother, Phil, needed to wean those whiteface heifers, and also get them away from his bull for a few months. We have plenty of pasture, so they'll be spending the summer with us.

Cliff is mowing hay even as I type this. There's a 40% chance of rain, but the weather-guessers don't think it will be a lot of rain. When it's first mowed, hay can stand a little rain and still be OK. And yes, we do realize how often the forecasters are wrong.

This past spring I went crazy ordering perennial flowers to plant in front of our house. These coneflowers are a delight.

You just have to love marigolds; these are the ones I started in the house in March, from tiny seeds. Free seeds, I believe, thrown in with one of my flower orders.

These are some sort of miniature zinnias. Over a year ago, I took part in a pay-it-forward thing a blogging buddy was doing, and she sent me a box containing several delightful little gifts. One was a seed tape. It was too late to plant flowers when I received it last year, so I waited till this year. I've really been using the gardening gloves she included in my package, too.

In my frenzy of ordering flowers, I didn't keep track of what was planted where. I didn't even write down what the flowers were. See those tall, spindly plants? Do any of you know what those things are? Right now they're downright ugly, and I've even had the thought that perhaps I have unwittingly been nurturing weeds, thinking they were flowers.