I came back from ten days of East Coast travel visiting my family to find that my garden had mostly survived, due to Kevin’s attempts to keep it watered. I did lose a few plants, but it’s really my fault — they were new plantings, and I was in such a rush when I was leaving that I forgot to flag them for him as plants in need of extra daily watering. Alas!
Yesterday, I weeded another section of the garden — I’m SO behind on this task, which I normally do in April / May — and today I put down mulch there. (This is the calculation that runs in my head — if I weed and put down a bag of mulch daily for the next two weeks, then I might actually finish mulching the garden before the worst of the weeds start pushing through the mulch layers where I started…)
I did take a little time to stake up my Annabelle hydrangea a bit more. It’s such a giant that even though I have a structure that holds up most of it, at this point, that isn’t quite big enough, and it was seriously encroaching on the path. So I cut away some of the outermost stems to make bouquets for the house, and I put in a few bendable Y-stakes to keep some of the rest from trailing on the ground. Better!
Usually I try to avoid planting things that need staking, but I love this Annabelle — I planted it over a decade ago, and it’s just so iconic. So I’ll put up with a little fussiness from her. 
