Let it rain, down on meeeeee.....

We were promised some thunderstorms this afternoon...

...and when the wind picked up, the silver maple across the way started showing off its silver.

The girls were nervous and at one point everyone ran for the front door.
We got a few sprinkles, but it didn't amount to anything.
But we are supposed to get a good drenching sometime in the wee hours.
We could use a good rain. The ground is cracking in places, but you know the only thing really suffering? The grass.
All the native plants are fine, maybe just a bit limp around the edges. But the grass is suffering. Why? Because it is a greedy, non-native. If I can, I will go out tomorrow and get a picture of how nasty the grass looks next to my nice native plants.

This volunteer is a scarlet oak, I think.
A free plant!
We found it growing under a picnic table that had been forgotten in the honeysuckle forest (the table was left by the previous owners) and when I finally dug the table out, I sheared off the top of the oak even though I was trying to be careful.
I thought the poor thing was a goner, but over the last month, it has come back. Now that I can get to it, I am going to transplant it over to the prairie and as it grows, it will add another dimension, shade and habitat to the tall grasses and natives. We will have a nice mini-ecosystem, and if I can sweet-talk Geoff, we will also have a pond nearby. Man, we will have so many critters!

Someone tell me what this is.
It was on the spiraea. Isn't it a cute little thing?

Free plants get me all warm and fuzzy. These daisies were saved from the mower (thankfully they were starting to bloom the last time I mowed!) and they are also filling spaces between some of our pines.
Oh! Here you can see some of the grass getting crunchy. Around the trees, as they suck up the water they need, the grass is drying up. Oh, well. Like I have said before, I would be happy if all the grass died. Well, maybe leave a bit for the girls to do somersaults on.

"Dees are fo you, Mommy."

My project for the day:
While I work on Geoff about building a real pond, I thought I would do a tiny little water source in the back yard. This is my hummingbird/butterfly garden, in its second year. There's lobelia, bee balm, bleeding hearts (which seem to have disappeared) and a new wild strawberry and also a pink beard-tongue.
I got a plastic green bowl planter and dug a hole for it, put it in and surrounded it will old carpet (that was going to be thrown out at RAPTOR...and I thought, "Hmmm...I can use that!") for weed barrier. Tomorrow, I will surround it with rocks (we have lots of large rocks that we keep digging out of flower beds and around the house and we also have some smaller marble pieces in the front of the house I can borrow from) and cover up the carpet. I will put a big stone in the water as a perching area for birds and maybe find a tiny little water plant to sink in there.
Oh, and I need to mulch around the flowers.
(I also have a left-over bag of mulch!)
So this little improvement cost all of $10.