Tag Archives: garden

Jun1

Flower Friday

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Well I would love to promise a post every Friday about what is blooming this week in the gardens, but in reality that isn’t going to happen. As new things bloom I’ll do my best to capture some of the beauty to spread around.

Right now I have a lupine blooming in the front of the house. It is a plant I had gotten the end of season last year and didn’t know what to expect from it.

WOWEE! It is SO beautiful! I haven’t grown lupine before but you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to be planting a lot more of it! I’ve got it planted next to a Tiger Eye Sumac so the color of the bright purple flowers against the chartreuse green is VERY striking. LOVE IT!

And the shape of the flowers is so very interesting…

Happy Friday peeps! We (fingers crossed no complications) close on our new place today!

May29

Moving on…and rhubarb

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Well I am ready to get back into some more regular blogging. Hubs and I have been quite occupied with a variety of things lately. The largest of those being the purchase of a new house/property and selling our current home.

The great news is that we have buyers for our home and I am just about 100% sure that they are going to LOVE it here as much as we have. It is truly going to be a bittersweet move for us. We have put a lot of ourselves into this house and it is going to be hard to leave it behind. BUT we are moving to an awesome new place. Well, it will be awesome once we get done with it!

Like this house, our new one is structurally sound – just needs to be updated and whoopy doopied. :) (totally a verb) We are making all sorts of plans in our heads as to what we are going to do out there – move some rooms around, open it up. First things first though – CLEANING and PAINTING. Oh the joys…will put up pics of the new place soon. We are scheduled to close FRIDAY!

 

Being busy has largely kept me out of the gardens – which makes me grateful that I have taken a super low maintenance approach to the landscaping and gardens around the house. They look great – especially after the last bout of rain we had. At any rate, the rhubarb has been left to grow wild and I haven’t harvested it. I was telling everybody how big the leaves have gotten, but it is hard to actually get the point across so hubby and I took some snaps with a few leaves in the backyard today after work. (He is such a good sport – and a real cutie pie too!)

giant rhubarb leaf

 

rhubarb2

 

Are you impressed with the size?

Surely you must be.

They are really gigantic rhubarb leaves! Ginormous. Humongous. Extraordinarily large. Exciting!

A few summers ago we used rhubarb leaves to make some stepping stones in the garden. The veins on the leaves are really big and veiny so they work really well.

I am looking forward to starting new gardens at our acreage…we should be able to squeeze some plants in somewhere on our 24 acre plot of dreamland, right?

 

Apr24

Tulip Time!

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Has it been like a week since I posted last? Wow – time, please stop whizzing by me so fast.

It was a beautiful afternoon here in the valley and husband is gone at conferences so I spend some time outside in the gardens after work. I didn’t get much done other than enjoying the weather and pulling a few weeds, but it does look better out there.

The tulips are in full bloom right now. What a sight! I don’t have as many fun colored blooms as last year, some of my bulbs rotted, but there are quite a few and they are spread all around which is awesome.

magenta tulip

I love the different colors in the centers of them. So pretty!

red and yellow tulip

And a close up of the petals reveals really pretty feathering in the colors. Nature is so awesome, don’t you agree?!

I also noticed last night that one of my perennial geraniums in the front of the house is starting to bloom. Everything seems to be so far ahead of schedule this year! I love it! Also saw that one of my bleeding hearts is just starting to bloom! Which is crazy, because the other one I have hasn’t even broken ground yet…hope it’s still alive!

Life continues to be busy for us – but a good busy. I went to a city wide garage sale on Saturday with a new friend from work. We found a few AWESOME deals. So fun. Then hubs and I spent part of the weekend in the cities for our niece’s baptism and then had to scurry back for dance class Sunday evening. Part of me is enjoying all the craziness and part of me is missing the days of working from home and enjoying lots of downtime. We’ll get this balancing act figured out someday…

One last pic from the backyard – love that sunshine! Everybody have a great week!

pink tulip

Feb3

Artwork by mother nature

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We woke up today to another morning surrounded by fog and frost. It is so beautiful outside…in a kind of dreary way. The frost today did not look like what we usually get – hoarfrost, it was very spiky and pointy. I don’t know if it is actually a different kind of frost or not, but it was gorgeous and all over. The hard part about taking pictures in this kind of weather and trying to capture the frost is the lack of contrast. It would be beautiful against a clear blue sky, but against the fog and overcast skies it is a little tricky. I went out to the gardens in the backyard to try and capture some of the little snaps in time. Here are a few…

hydrangea with frostThis is an Annabelle hydrangea. This was here when we moved and I love it! The flower heads get HUGE on it!

corkscrew willow with frostA few branches on the corkscrew willow. You can see clearly how pointy the frost was. Pretty isn’t it?

garden light with frostWe have garden lights strung up along the fence – jack frost paid them a visit as well.

coreopsis with frostThread-leaf coreopsis – love this plant, it blooms pretty much non-stop and the insects really like it too! So glad I didn’t cut everything down this fall since we have such little snow, all the dead flowers are still showing!

elm tree with frostA branch from one of our big elm trees – in b&w.

I hope you all take the time to get out and appreciate the sights while they are here! Winter may be a bit of a bummer, but there are some things that make all this cold worth it! :)