food, crochet, merriment
Experiment- I’m going to lightly spray doTERRA Peppermint and Cedarwood essential oils on my garden shoes before digging in the yard. Pretty sure it will send all the Box Elder bugs and ants scurrying AWAY from me instead of up my pant legs. Yikes! Here I go.
Oh and if it doesn’t work, I have Lavender to soothe the skin irritations. Wish me luck!
PS–It worked!! BAhahha!
I took a little stroll around the back yard today. Soooo many pretty things to see…
all of which, I didn’t plant. They were here when we bought the house.
Looks as though someone put a lot of love and care into each and every plant.
I suspect, most of them have been here for a very long time.
A few of the bushes desperately need a good pruning…
while others can just go ahead and grow to the moon and back–they are just that pretty.
Trouble is–with the exception of the Hens & Chicks– I don’t know what any of them are, what they need, or how and when to prune them. I would be happy to look it up, but without knowing what they are called, I’m at a bit of a standstill.
If any of you know what plants I’m dealing with, would you let me know in the comments below?
That way, I can do some research and take care of them properly–you know, leave them alone or cut them back.
In the meantime…
The girls are very willing to help.
HAAA!
Oh, my brave, sweet flowers are just barely starting to come to life!
I should have clipped these wild things back…but I just didn’t have the heart. They seem to know just where they want to go.
I’ve never grown peonies before and I must say, the blossoms are not there…not there…not there…and then BOOM! Big, feathery and gorgeous. It was a lovely surprise this morning.
The unstoppable Columbine that just keeps blooming and blooming and blooming…and all in the perfect purple-y color.
Not so much a bloom but another sort of pretty thing popping it’s head out from the leaves.
These are my lovely Daney-boy roses. He bought this bush right before he left to Lithuania for two years. He knows me well because one is lavender…
and the other was bright pink…that is, until it froze and came back completely wild…and a deep scarlet.
A beautiful garden with a mind all it’s own.
Just my kind of place.
:}
One day the Bald Kid was particularly bored and started digging up the front flower bed. No particular reason…he just wanted to.
Which turned out to be a pretty handy-dandy thing because Jillian and Josh brought me a zillion impatiens and one giant hydrangea for Mother’s Day.
What, I ask you, would I have done if all that dirt was still hard and weedy and dreadful? Heaven only knows.
But since it was all soft and mushy, we added some soaked peat moss and a busload of compost and stuck those pretty little things right in the ground. Again, I say “we” like I have a mouse in my pocket or something. It was the guy who did it all again. But I took all the flowers out of the packs and lined them all up and handed them to him in just the right order. That’s an important job too.
He is an awfully nice guy though.
It was a good, kind, flowery day.
And it made me very, very happy.
:}
Tons and tons of work going on just outside my window in the back.
Oh, mostly by the Bald Kid, of course.
He did most of the digging and mixing…
and I did most of the pointing and clapping.
But I did manage to plant most of the flowers on the left side–namely, the phlox, veronica, peonies, columbine, celosia and bleeding heart.
All while the big guy was busy planting a zillion strawberry starts. Yes, yes, I know they are very close–too close perhaps. But if we have to thin them later, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Besides…Nessie’s a big fan.
Miss Chicken Fingers loves her new resting place too.
The best part of all—look at my new brick planter! Isn’t it gorgeous? Why that clever boy of mine, put that cool thing together in a couple of hours. And me? Well, I couldn’t even lift the bricks. He’s amazing I tell you and I’m sooooo glad to have him back.
So is Buddah.
Heh, heh.
:]
