The lily is a day lily you have there. Each flower will last , but a day. Looks like a reddish one. Bolted lettuce is a pitiful sight and dang bitter. If you rip off a piece of a leaf it'll ooze this milky substance. Another way to tell if it has bolted. Nice collection of garden lovelies!

Yellow coneflowers - who knew? I guess you & Norma! Let me know if you'd like to trade some seeds this fall. I'll have some plain old purple coneflowers and many black-eyed susan seeds if you'd like a few.

Yup, bolted. Might as well pull that sucker out and start anew -- this time with some Romaine seeds. The irony is it's too late for it, but it's TIME for it -- time to plant now (or soon) for a fall crop. Do it. You'll be glad you did. The squash blossom looks fine. That's a male blossom. The female blossom is attached, if you look real hard, to a little embryonic summer squash that will get bigger. The blossoms only last a day and they either do their job or not, getting fertilized, or ahem, having plant sex, and then pretty soon, if they did their job, you'll see a little squash forming. It all happens rather quickly, so keep checking it daily to see. My favorite time to cut and eat them is when they are still about 4 inches long and still with a blossom attached. That also encourages the squash to have more sex and more babies, as it were.

Feed that sucker some Fertilizer for Dummies. (aka Miracle Gro)

But clearly that wasn't what grandmother wanted... and at that point, it's all about what they want, not what we want... OK I'll stop! Bob will be in my thoughts and prayers, you too.

Beautiful flowers! Not thinking of elephants, thinking of Bob, and of you.

Oh, and when it gets to the bad part... morphine is a good thing. And rolling the patient helps them die easier/sooner. We found that out after. Mom had said 'mama I'm going to turn you over', and though she couldn't speak any longer, grandmother flashed dagger eyes so mom didn't. The nurse later said if we had rolled her, she'd have probably died some hours earlier.

Our purple coneflowers look yellow right now. We also have volunteer sunflowers from the birds! So I missed your yesterday post. I'd say get lots of good pain meds, or do whatever he wants to be comfortable. Mom lost both parents within a year (6 months?), both to cancer. I saw grandfather within his last few months and was with grandmother when she died. So here's a funny deathbed story... Grandmother had been in and out of things for a couple days and was very actively dying. She had stopped talking about the people in the room (her sister, my grandfather, all her family that went before her), but the night before she died, mom clearly heard Aunt Ruth call out to grandmother. OK, here's the funny part... I'd stepped out of the room for a moment, and auntie linda came running in, crying, and I jumped up thinking grandmother had died. No no she said... and she tells me this... Mom reached over to close grandmother's mouth, and uncle (all her 3 kids were there, she waited an extra half day for my uncle) said 'Cindy (mom's name) you can't do that'. And as mom's saying 'why not', grandmother takes one of those huge rattly dying breaths, and uncle says 'because she isn't dead yet'. At which they all start laughing and crying. I walked back in with auntie, and she (who didn't have the greatest relationship with her mother, but cared for her well-like a mother!- and in her home those last 6 months) leaned over and smoothed grandmother's brow and kissed her and said 'mama go to daddy, go to jesus'. And she died. Just. Like. That.

Cookie is right about our sweet hearted Sandy. You are always in my thoughts. Your garden looks better than you think and maybe you should be the one to eat the squash blossoms...they are yummy.

You are such a good kindhearted woman. You're willing to love a sunflower that some bird dropped off.

Yup. Bolted is right.

xo