Another overcast, damp, humid day, but I'm not complaining.  The weeds pull so easily in the rain-soaked ground and I have plenty of areas that I can work without being in mud...namely the lavender field and the Moonlight Garden.  The rain has allowed every single weed seed to germinate without fail, keeping me busy, busy, busy.  There's simply no time to finish planting or deadhead, but I did take time to pick gooseberries from my one bush in the Cook's Garden yesterday.  What a harvest!  I'll be able to make several pies and a batch of gooseberry jam later on, but right now I'm just sticking them in the freezer.  No time to bake either!  I need to take time to pick black raspberries next before the birds get them all.  There's really an abundance of mulberries this year, too.

     Flowers continue to come into bloom about 3 weeks earlier than normal, so we're already enjoying several varieties of daylilies and the frothy bloom of the Queen of the Meadow.  If I were to make a list of everything in bloom, it would just take too long.  Each garden is filled with blossoms of every color in the rainbow plus.  Sometimes I just gasp in amazement at the beauty of a single bloom, the subtle shadings of color, the intricacies of shapes.  And then a butterfly will land on my arm, and the entire world seems magical as a chorus of birds serenade in the background.

     I finally saw a toad this week, just as I was beginning to despair that they had all disappeared.  I'd think that there would be lots of big FAT ones, if they dined on slugs.  This continual rain has caused a population burst of slugs and I'm finding them on plants and in areas that they usually do not frequent.  I cannot see anything beautiful about a slug, except for the fact that they can actually move their globby body seemingly without effort up and down wet leaves.

     So, I'm not going to complain about the rain, rain, rain....because I'm pretty sure that later on this summer,  I'll be wishing for some.