While I Was Gone

I went away for a few days recently and after a long drive, we arrived home after dark. The next day I was curious to see what had happened in our yard while we were gone. That's part of my routine after we go away. Unload the car, scan the mail, and check out the yard. A Second Look, so to speak. We were gone less than a week, but it was surprising to see some of the changes that happened in that short amount of time.

Here is a tour of some of the things I found.

The weather was hot and humid while we were gone with lots of rain. The begonias in front of the house thrived and had grown.

However, the pumpkin vine in the back did not survive. This was a volunteer and we had decided to let it grow wherever it wanted. It was a beautiful healthy vine when we left. 

But the zinnia along the same walk took off while we were gone. Other zinnias, planted in pots on the deck, looked only slightly better than the pumpkin vine.

The dill in the same bed also had a lot of new blooms. Before this, I had been trying to cut the blooms so it wouldn't go to seed too soon. However the bees are enjoying the new blossoms, so I may just leave them. This was also a volunteer that I transplanted from another spot.

Around the side of the house, I found grape hyacinth leaves that were coming up.

Close to there, I found the first coneflower that had all of its petals intact.  Something has been munching down on all of the coneflowers' petals making them look like Morticia Addams has been around.

In the same bed, more Black-Eyed-Susans had bloomed, but something is starting to eat the petals. Maybe our muncher has moved on from the coneflowers.

Moving away from the house, I went to check on some newly planted hostas. There I found the deer  had visited while we were gone. Another place they ate a tomato plant until it looked like no more than a stick in the ground.

Also in the back part of the yard, mushrooms had sprung up.

Moving up to the deck, the sunflower had several new blooms. This was a volunteer, too, from the bird feeders.

The bird feeders were empty.  So I filled them and made new nectar for the hummingbird feeder. 

There will be seed in the feeders as long as this squirrel and his buddies are content to eat sunflower seeds dropped into the grass. But I don't expect that to last for long. Why should they work at picking seeds out of the grass when they usually lay on the bottom of the bird feeder above and munch away?

I don't have pictures to show you everything else I found such as new poison ivy, half of an azalea bush that had died, and nearby canna lilies and marigolds which were doing well. I also found an empty bird nest, so I hope the babies successfully fledged while we were gone. And the most interesting thing I discovered was a sled filled with rainwater and hundreds of tadpoles swimming in it.