September brought back a little rain, and occasionally cooler days than August, but it was still plenty hot.  I eventually ran out of patience with the constant mowing and scalped the parking strips awfully short.  I don't hate mowing the lawn, but I'm over having to break it up into two sessions due to the heat.

I'm looking forward to turning some of the front lawn into a paver patio.  I think it will be a bit friendlier for people who'd like to wander and enjoy the flowers, and anything that reduces lawn mowing is OK by me!

You wouldn't think that the slightly cooler weather would make a lot of difference, but it was just enough for big blooms and more intense colors on the rose bushes.

I picked up (which is to say, John picked up, because he's much better at lifting heavy objects than I am) a vintage bird bath at E. Marie's during Junk fest this year.  I'd been looking for a second one to put out front, but I didn't want plastic, and I wasn't in love with the concrete ones that I'd come across.  This one looks like it's been here for years!

I didn't take very many garden photos in September, being busier than usual with other things like attending the Midwest Tea Festival in Kansas City.  If you've never been, you should definitely check it out next year. 

Can you identify the man I'm standing next to in the very blurry photo?

The David Austin roses I planted this Spring continue to impress me.  "The Generous Gardener" seems to never be without pale-pink blooms, and "Gertrude Jekyll" has the strongest, sweetest fragrance of any rose I've ever grown.  I'm out there every week trying to keep them tied to the fence and arbor.  I cringed when I paid for them, but they've been worth every penny!

Mostly, August was so hot that I didn't do much beyond mowing the grass and hand-watering the shrubs that I transplanted in early July.  I have never been able to take the heat, and it's really a toss-up between which is worse:  the over-100 temps with dry air but constant wind, or the over 90 temps with shade, a breeze and high humidity.  Much as I love garden season, I always look forward to wood stove weather!

Why do you come here?

It’s not because your stomach told your brain that it was time to re-fuel. Not that you aren’t hungry. Of course you’re hungry. But why are you here, at the Ironstone Cottage Tea Room & Garden, instead of one of the myriad other places you could be eating? They’re cheaper. They’re faster. You can just drive through in your pajamas. They have burgers, or fries, or ice cream, or coffee, or soda, or all of the above. Why are you here?

Maybe you’re here because it’s quiet. You want to have a nice meal and visit with your best friend or your sister or your husband or your daughter, and you know you can’t find that anywhere else. Or maybe you want to meet with a client over lunch, without having a circus going on in the background. We certainly try to create a peaceful atmosphere--but if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it unless you turn your phone off, and neither is anybody else in the dining room.

Maybe you want to eat real food that doesn’t leave you feeling hungry or miserable. That fast, fried, carbonated stuff isn’t as fast or as cheap as it used to be, is it? Maybe we’re the only place in town that makes desserts that your body can tolerate. Maybe you just want to treat yourself to a pork-free meal out for once. Maybe you know you should be eating healthier, but you didn’t have the time to fix a healthy lunch on your way out the door this morning.

Maybe you want to be pampered: To sit at a table with a real tablecloth, on a comfortable chair, and be served by someone who is glad to see you, makes eye contact, speaks in a friendly voice, and doesn’t try to rush you out the door. Maybe you came to be entertained by a girl who loves cats and belongs in the theater.

We open our doors 4 days a week to serve people who want more than the minimum: Good Relationships. Good food. Good service. Good atmosphere. Good Tea & Good Company.



Now it's your turn to tell us, why are you here?

July was a far better month for the garden than we had any right to expect.  We had more rain than we're used to seeing, and the Japanese beetles were sparse this year.

The roses mostly took a break, but they did start putting on blooms toward the end of the month.  Scentimental dropped all of his leaves, and I though he was going to just give up and die on me.  After some anti-fungal spray and a little Espoma rose food, he bounced back, put on new leaves and even produced a couple of nice blooms.

The new David Austin roses I planted in April have really impressed me.  I'd have been happy to just see them get established and survive the summer, but The Generous Gardener actually bloomed!

The Rose of Sharon that I planted last summer are still quite small, but they are healthy and they both produced a few nice blooms.  One is bright pink, and the other has produced both pink and solid white blossoms on the same plant.  Weird.

The pink lilies did something interesting.  A few got really tall (like 5 feet!) before putting on blooms in June.  The rest, which I really do think were from the same bag of bulbs, got not quite so tall, and bloomed in July.  I'm not sure why, but I'll take it!

The purple clematis (no idea of name, I lost the tags) gave several rounds of blooms through May, June and July. 

We had perfect weather, in many respects, for maximum blooms this year.  I only had to water the flowers about 3 times this entire summer.  That's a bit too much rain to avoid fungus problems with the roses, but everything else loved it.  Especially the hydrangeas.  Once those things start blooming, they just keep going!  There are pink hydrangeas in the garden that opened in May, and still have the blooms on them!  There are a few stinkers however, that didn't bloom at all this year.  Since I lost the tags on many of them, we'll have to watch and see if maybe they just didn't have enough old wood to produce blooms, or if they might need some pruning.

The real stars of July were the dahlias though.  I planted a couple of giant purple dahlias this spring, and they've really done well.  People ask almost every day what those huge purple flowers by the birdbath are.  I also planted a smaller, deep red dahlia this spring.  The pink/lavender dahlias that I planted last spring, and which I forgot to dig up in the fall, wintered over and are still going strong.  All of them have to be staked and tied up to keep the flower stalks from falling over and breaking off, but they're totally worth the trouble.

We extended the front flower beds and planted some hydrangeas, wiegela, snowball bush and spirea in the corner.  I'll fill in with some mums this fall, and add some bulbs for spring.  And of course, if/when I find good deals on flowers I love next summer, I'll add them too.  You can build a beautiful garden for not a huge investment if you have some patience.