July Update: A new streak begins and the garden keeps on growing!

Matt and I are home after spending 10 days in beautiful St. Lucia and a few days in Western Maryland for the DockDogs Regional Championships. I’ll post honeymoon photos and the dockdogs recap soon, but in the meantime I have some updates!

After 205 consecutive days my mile-a-day streak ended the day before our honeymoon began (June 13th). I initially thought I would keep on streaking while in St. Lucia but for the first week we were staying in the rainforest on top of a mountain at the end of a precariously washed out dirt road so running a mile a day wasn’t really feasible. Oh well! 🙂 As of July 1st I have started a new streak. We’ll see if I can beat 205 days… I’ll reach that goal on January 21, 2014.

In other news, we had record rainfall in June and as a result my vegetable garden has been growing like crazy! Check out this photo that I took today… a comparison shot from my May 10th gardening post is below.

Quite a difference, right? When we got home from St. Lucia I was shocked to see how much the parsley, thyme and tomatoes had grown and I was overwhelmed by the enormous zucchini plants!! (I think my basil was overwhelmed too… it’s now living in the shadow of those large-leafed behemoths!) Here are some other photos of my garden and back yard flowers from today.

Purple Hosta Flowers

Baby Green Tomatoes!

Pink Zinnia

Mmm… Basil

Shasta Daisy

Mint

Monster Zucchini Plants

While I was wandering around with my camera this afternoon I was surprised to spot a white-tailed deer in the front yard. It is quite common for us to see deer in our area (usually in other peoples’ yards or dashing across the road!) but it is very, VERY rare to see a deer in our yard because Bailey has made it her life mission to stalk and chase any and all wildlife that comes within her invisible fence boundary.

I guess the neighborhood deer herd realized that Bailey was not at home for most of June and as a result they are now making themselves comfortable in the front yard. Luckily Bailey was on her game this afternoon and as soon as this deer made a move Bailey (who must have been stalking it from a different angle as I snapped away with the camera) came blasting over, chased it away, and then proceeded to roll and rub in the deer’s scent for a good 30 seconds. Good dog, Bailey (even if you do smell now…)