How My Garden Grows (in the heat)

Please excuse the glare, it's been a little sunny here.

So, everything has been growing like crazy, although with the heat they seem to have slowed down a bit.

The daylillies are blooming!

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And so are the daisies!! Hard to believe they were teeny-tiny just a couple months ago.

On another note, don't you hate it when your nail gets a tear in it and you have to cut it off?? Just when my nails were looking nice...

At least I won't be missing many outdoor activities this weekend when I'm inside doing my nails.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

How My Garden Grows: An Update

This was my garden a little over a month ago...

And this is it now...

Things are finally starting to grow and get fuller.

My calla lillies have come up and are blooming!

My blue pin-cushion flowers were kind of small...

And now they are big!

The paprika yarrow has just exploded and is huge!

The peach tree is coming along, although we only have 1 peach on it for this year. My daisies, purple coneflowers, and the chinese orchids are still left to bloom, so there's still more to come!

Happy Tuesday!

How my Garden Grows: Part II

I am back! Work and a wedding kept me busy last week, but I was able to squeeze in some gardening. Last weekend I went to a "plant swap"! How genius is this - you bring some of your extra perennial plants that you don't want or need, and trade them for some that other people have brought. I took some yarrow and strawberries (which are totally invasive, by the way!), and walked away with enough plants to fill in my bed!

I took home some purple coneflowers, which will look like this when they're fully grown:



And an obedient plant, which will look like this (only in pink) when it's mature:


I took some irises to plant around the base of my tree. They're a little floppy right now, but next year they'll look better.

Here is the peach tree - to the left and right are some autumn sages that my parents gifted to me from their yard, and in the back will be the purple coneflowers and some calla lillies. To the left of the autumn sage bush are some small sprouts of shasta daisies and the paprika yarrow that I already had.

Here is what the autumn sage will look like when it's grown and in bloom - really pretty! They attract lots of hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees.

Sandwiched between two more autumn sages is a Chinese orchid. I had never heard of these, but they are more like lillies than orchids.

Most of the time it'll look like an ornamental grass, but when it blooms, it'll look like this:

A close-up of the shasta daisies now:

And what they'll look like in a couple months:

So now that it's all filled in, I can't wait for it all to bloom!! As long as I'm lucky, they'll all live and do well. The bed was prepped, and I planted all of the newbies in the right places for light needs, so I'll keep you all updated!

I hope you all have a great Monday!

How My Garden Grows

This was my garden from last year:

Cut to 2010, and the great blizzard we had in February.

The tree? Dead (well, to be fair, it was on its last leg and probably half-dead already).

The pomegranate bush? The sage bush? Calla Lillies??

Dead Dead and Dead.

What did survive?
My orange daylillies, my blue pin-cushion flowers (pictured first above), my Japanese maple tree (thank God), and the paprika yarrow (third pic above).

So, we bought a peach tree, I dug up and divided the daylillies, moved the pin-cushion flowers and yarrow, and added a bunch of mulch - after we weeded and weeded and cleaned up all the dead plants. (Evidently, along with killing plants, snow brings with it lots of little weedy seeds because after the snow melted, the bed filled up with butt-loads of weeds.)

This is how it looks now:

Pretty sparse right now

Oh, and these little creeping blue flowering things... which I don't know the name of. But I bought a little 4-inch pot of them at Home Depot last year, and this stuff has grown!! So much, that I divided it, and the divisions are about 3 times larger now than the 4-inch pot I planted last year!

So, the plan now is to buy some more of the purple fringe-flower bushes to fill in the bare spots. I think that will help tie it all together, and I love their purple leaves!

More to come once those are planted, but for now, here is stage 1.

Out in the Garden

This weekend I was out planting our fall/winter flowers in the hanging pots off our back porch. Whenever it's time to switch out cool season annuals, or warm season annuals as I was doing, I'm always a little sad. While I know that once the first frost or freeze comes, they'll be toast, it makes me a little sad to rip up such pretty flowers and get rid of them.





But, with the new season comes some tiny new flowers with their own promise of beauty. And planting them now gives them the chance to grow a bit and get established before the cold and freezes roll in.

This past spring I planted angel wing (or dragon wing) begonias, and they did really well. They were so pretty and got so big! I replaced them with some cyclamen, which are kind of dainty, but have such pretty foliage and unusual flowers. Both do well in the shade.
I also planted some dianthus in my pots up front by the mailbox, but didn't get a chance to take pics of them yet. I'll have to take some and share those later this week (guess what? it's raining again!). I planted dianthus up there a couple of years ago and had great luck with them, so I'm hoping for the same good luck this year. My pansies got kind of leggy and floppy last year, so I didn't want to use them again.

Hope you all had a great weekend! Ready for another week?

How our garden grows

Upside down!!!

We made our own "Topsy Turvy", and it's been working really well! This tomato plant will be the first to produce. Chris thinks next year we should have our whole garden like this.... lol!

I tell more about it over at EAD today.

Oh, and yes, after being fairly sunny yesterday, it's overcast and supposed to rain again today! Ugh! After Saturday's monsoon, I'm ready for the sunshine. I know we need the rain, but can it come, like, once a week or something?

Texas flood

It has been cloudy and rainy since Sunday. Boo.
And it is supposed to stay partly cloudy with good chances of rain until the weekend.
So, I thought I'd share what I WISH our back yard looked like right now...

This would be a great time of year to camp outside for us - during the midst of summer, it doesn't cool off too much at night.

Okay, so this isn't a back yard, but how great is this picture?? I love the look of containers lining a walkway! Container gardening is great for small areas that you can't have a traditional garden.

On a postitive note, at least it looks like our weekend will be nice. Our lawn and plants better be green and growing after all this rain! I'm just sayin'... because I think I'll be sad if they drown or wash away.

*all images from Desire to Inspire

My Garden, part deux

We spent Sunday working in our yard, and I have some more finished pictures of my flowerbed to show. We still need to add mulch, but for the most part, it's done.
Now it's just time for these plants to grow!

This first picture is of our tiny apple tree (that's still hanging on, after nearly dying each of the last 2 years). From the left of the picture is some Stonecrop (a small, low, groundcover), my pomegranate bush, and 2 perenial pin-cushion flowers. In front of the tree and to the right are 4 strawberry plants, and a coral autumn sage bush. The decorative rocks came from my parents' place in Granbury - lots of rocks there!



This view is to the left of the apple tree. From the right side of the photo we have Paprika Yarrow surrounding another rock, an Indian Hawthorne bush, blue Veronica (a perenial with little blue flowers), a Texas Sage bush, a Calla Lilly plant (pink), an orange Day Lily, another Indian Hawthorne bush, another rock, and my Japanese Maple with purple clover and a Holly Fern underneath.

It all seems so small and sparse right now - I'm looking forward to everything growing and blooming! The Pomegranate bush blooms with these beautiful orange flowers, and the Texas Sage with small purple flowers!

I'll be sure to post more once it all starts blooming and filling in.

April showers

Heeeellllloooooo........
In case anyone is wondering - busy work, no internet at home, sick, sick, planting flowerbeds, adopting out foster puppies, making curtains..... whew!

I wanted to share some pictures of my still not quite done flowerbed! I have been wanting this for 2 years now, and FINALLY we are getting it in. I have had a couple of bushes still in the nursery pots for over a year!! Basically, I had some things I wanted to transplant to a sunny locale, plus looking at a graying fence all the time is boring.
So the first step, after marking where you want the bed to be is to rent a tiller and chop up the ground and all the grass. This is not as easy as it may sound. It is hard, as the tiller is jerky and vibrate-y, and after a while you loose feeling in your hands. I highly recommend having a husband, brother, dad, male friend, or hiring out the task to a very strong person. I thought I could have done it myself.... HA! Right.
So, this is after step one:

After you clean out the bed somewhat, removing all the dead chopped up grass bits, we added a layer of composted leaves. We also added/put in the green metal edging that you can shape. We had just spent about 30 minutes trying to get rid of the grass, and I don't want it coming back. At least not in my flower bed.

Now comes the fun part of planting things! I got a great deal on a Japanese Maple tree at Home Depot - very excited about that. I started with planting the bigger things that I knew where I wanted them to go. Since then, I've also transplanted 2 larger bushes. I'm now left with a few smaller things to plant, and mulch.

I'm hopeful that I can get this all finished up this weekend - that is if we can stay healthy!! But once I do, I'll share more photos!

I've also been busy making curtains for our bedroom! Easy no-sew kind. I finally found some fabric that I liked, and that was within our budget. You can go check them out at Elizabeth Anne Designs.

Hope everyone is doing well!