Rain, Rain, Rain

I can't remember such a wet spring. I can't remember such a busy spring. This little guy has kept watch over my garden throught rain, snow, sleet and hail and never seems to be happy about it--but he's still here!

Between the rain and the activities, I've not done hardly a thing to the yard. Not that I'm complaining about the rain!

But it is a good deal I have been planting perennials a few at a time.

The Gaillardia (Blanket Flower) is beginning to bloom. It's got some baby ones coming up around it that I want to move. This is a great drought and heat tolerant plant. It grows wild in pastures everywhere. I love to see a whole 'blanket' of them!

The poppies have come back! I'm so excited because I've planted them many times and they only come up one year! They're back and this is just the first of many flowers to come!

This is the only columbine that made it through the winter. It's about finished flowering, but still beautiful!

I love this Texas Cat Mint. I bought it on a clearance, clearance sale in July a few years ago when the store was getting rid of all the almost dead plants! It was just a tiny bit green and pretty pitiful looking! But now this lusciously sweet smelling plant takes up at least 3 feet of space and I chopped a bit off and have spread the love around the other flower beds. Bees, butterflies and hummingbirds are in it all summer long. I haven't seen the cat in it, thank heavens, or it would be flat and ugly!

The Coreopsis (tick seed--icky name!) has spread to the uttermost parts of the earth (backyard!) and this is the first flower from it. But there's many more to come as the others all have hard little knots of buds on them.

I've planted several of these plants--Pincushion flowers--this year. They are a perennial but I think moles and gophers love them because they don't seem to last long in my flower beds!

Does anyone know what this is? I planted it last year but can't find the tag that I was sure I left at the base of the plant! It grows in a mound and the flower groups are about an inch across.

I spent Saturday afternoon working on the mulch path/border that separates the grass from the flower beds. The moles had tunneled so much that is was full of holes and mounds. I raked and shoveled all the mulch into piles on an old tarp, pulled up the landscape fabric and shoveled and raked to level the ground. I fear that I went to a lot of work to soon be destroyed by those horrible burrowing varmints!

I hate them! I know when I have dying plants that they have created a huge crater underneath that needs filled in.

Anyone know how to get rid of them? We've poisoned them, our cat and dog hunt for them, we have some sonar repellant things that don't seem to phase them. Moles, moles, go away!