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Somebody said this blogging stuff was addictive!

Category: my gargen pictorial | Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 8:27 pm

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OMG! You guys are great. I can't believe somebody reads my stuff and then takes the time to post. I wish I had more time to read everybody's posts. Maybe clean clothes are over-rated.

Today (Tuesday, March 27) it got to (almost) 80 degrees. I took a picture:


Here's the two blooms I shot on Sunday:




Here's another daffodil. I took this picture at 1:30 this afternoon:



My daughter came in around 2:30 and said I had a daffodil open in the garden. It was the same plant!



And lastly, here's the flower garden and the iris bed:





That's all for now!

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A trenching we will go!

Category: my gargen pictorial | Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:20 pm

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Sunday dawned a beautiful day that provided a wonderful opportunity to spend time working in the garden. My husband went to Lowe's and took the kids with him, which allowed me to begin trenching out the garden beds for the mulch that I hope to have delivered this Friday if DH can take the day off. We will get four yards of mulch. We have a tractor with a front-end loader. Honestly, the thing scares the he!! out of me, so I leave the driving to him. Someday I'll learn how to use it (I used to drive our tractor when I was a kid, but that was a looooooong time ago!) but while we have little kids, someone has to watch the kids so that they don't get underfoot, and I'm just as happy to do that.

Here is a before picture of the main garden



and an after picture. You can see in the foreground where I've started digging out the grass to expand the garden.




Here's the iris bed before



and after.



And now that I don't have to be jealous of those already getting flowers, here's two of my soon-to-be-bloomers:





I still have three mulch beds in the front yard to do before we get the mulch delivered. We are supposed to have good weather the rest of the week, but dip back down into the 40's next week :(

That's all for now. I'm hoping to get outside this afternoon to take more shots. Unfortunately, we got a new computer last year and for some reason, our digital camera will not work with the new computer. I've tried to fix it, and I know nothing about computers. DH has tried to fix it, and he does know about computers. So until we figure it out, we have to download the pictures to the old computer in the basement, move them to a flash drive, then put them onto the new computer. After that, it's edit, resize, upload. Whew. A lot of work to post a picture. That's why it takes me a while to post pictures I took a few days ago!

I ordered three "Lemon Queen Heliantus" from Brecks. Since I'm a frugal gardener, I took them up on their $25 free gift certificate and purchased a plant that would bloom the longest: early summer to frost. So many of their bulbs need to be lifted for my zone (5). I think the yellow will look good in the garden. Any comments on Breck's products?

I'll be back later! Thanks for reading.
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My second garden pictures! look -- irises

Category: my gargen pictorial | Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 6:33 pm

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Okay, more like iris stubble. (They say to make your titles unique and descriptive to get more visitors!)

These were planted in the fall of 2004. My BIL thinned out his gardens and gave me probably 50-75 bulbs. I had three blooms in 2005 and they were gorgeous last summer. All deep purple. They are planted around a smoke bush. I'll take pictures when it blooms.



Here's the main garden. All the snow is gone! Yeah!! My first project for the garden will be to trench all the edges so we can get a load of mushroom compost. Love this stuff! It's smelly, but the plants really proper and grow. I don't think I mentioned, but you have probably surmised, that we only have perennials. No annuals for us. And nothing that needs lifted. That's just as bad as an annual in that it needs stored and replanted. Although, I do love glads. You can see a hint of purple on each side of the patio entrance. I'm not sure what those are called. They were hand-me-downs, too. They produce a yellow flower.

Until the next photo,
Amy





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Picture of the first day of spring!

Category: my gargen pictorial | Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 6:14 pm

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Here's the photo I took on Tuesday. The snow from the weekend was starting to melt. DH and I built the bench in 2002. There are four lilac bushes in front of the pine trees. The big bush next to the shed is a burning bush and it is absolutely gorgeous when it turns red in the fall. I sincerely hope I will still be blogging then. I plan to dig up the grassy area in front of the circle and make a stone path to the patio

Here goes my first photo!

Last edited: Mon May 21, 2007 2:50 pm

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Welcome to my blog

Category: my gargen pictorial | Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 5:17 pm

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Hello and welcome to my blog. Not a very entertaining first sentence, I know, but hopefully my witty prose will start pumping soon and I will have made you glad you chose to check out my blog. This is the first blog for me and only the second forum I've ever joined.

I've always wanted to take pictures of my garden at different times throughout the growing season, but my ambition has never been as great as my desire, so it is something I've never accomplished. But, oh, the power of the online community and the forums they flock to. If I tell myself I need to do something and I do it, great; but if I don't do it and no one knows I was supposed to do it, does it matter? Similar in theory to the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" But if I post that I need to do something and I don't, I have to respond to my failure and be accountable to a potentially mind-boggling amount of internet users. That is a powerful motivator. (That's the motivation gets me to clean my bathroom every morning. LOL)

So, my blog is all about my flower garden. We bought our home six years ago (has it really been that long?). It had a 22' above ground swimming pool five feet off the back of the house. Having a one-year old at the time, we did not want the hassle of a pool. They are, in my opinion, dangerous, and this pool in particular was ugly. Why do they make the outside of above-ground pools blue? They should be green so as to blend in with the surrounding grass. No, they make them to stand out as much as possible. Plus, the previous owners were going through a divorce and the pool was not kept up. (Don't feel bad for my children that we got rid of the pool. My in-laws have one and live five minutes away. My kids get to swim; Grandma and Grandpa get to see the kids a lot during the summer; and I don't have to deal with cleaning a pool. It's a win-win-win situation.)

Shortly after we bought the house, we found someone to take the pool in exchange for having dirt brought in and grass seed planted. After they took the pool, the guy said he was afraid he would crush our pipes having a load of dirt driven into our backyard, so he pretty much balked on his end of the agreement. Needing to get other things done in the house, we left the giant dirt circle in the backyard for a year. When the next spring rolled around, we decided to use the area for a flower garden instead of reseeding. A friend of my husbands was getting rid of some flagstone, so we used it to create a patio in the center. A few years later, we built an L-shaped bench at the edge of the patio. We also increased the garden from the original circle to aid in mowing and make it look less like the pit of a removed swimming pool. I'll have to dig up some pictures of what it has looked like through the years to give an idea of where it's come from.

The garden is an absoltue hodge-podge of plants. Most of them are freebies from our relatives. When we originally created the garden, we put in several (eight?) rose bushes. I guess we were going for an English rose garden. Many of them did not survive the first winter. We have maybe three or four left and they are not very big. We have daffodils, which are coming up now. We have loads of irises. We have purple cone flowers, more black-eyed susans than you can shake a stick at, and several types of coreopsis. We have many varieties of lillies, including my favorite, the star-gazer lilly. We've had many oak and maple trees take root and grow. We've cut down all but one, and it may go this year too. We're kind of flip-floppy on whether to keep it or let it go.

That's all for now. As soon as I figure out how to include images, I'll post my first photos. Thanks for reading my blog!

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