Gardening 2017: August

We found a toad in the garden (Mr. Toad, actually) on a hot day. The garden was cool and wet.

Sarah wanted to hold him. He eventually moved back into the garden.

Hopefully he comes back next year.

 And the harvest kept coming.

At last, the potatoes were mature. They weren't even buggy, though I had read that they were prone.

We grew red, yellow, and white onions. I actually planted the three colors alternating all the way down the row. The rewarding thing is that they came up in the same color scheme as I planted them.

Finally, after drying the sunflower heads for a couple of weeks, we spent a VERY long time removing the seeds. After that part, we brine-boiled and baked them. Miraculously, we came out with some decent, lightly salted sunflower seeds.

Gated Garden

We have 5 sprinkler boxes spread throughout our back yard. It is kind of obnoxious. These two are right in the middle of the yard, so we decided to conceal them by building a garden around them. It is planted full of summer perennials, and it is going to have a cute bench in it one of these days.

Many of these plants were planted in the fall. Then this garden was under 3 feet of snow for close to 3 months. That fence was almost hidden. Apparently the intense winter was too much for a lot of our new plant babies, because we only had about a 30% survival rate. Some things survived, though, and we had fun choosing new things. This was my center garden around the beginning of June. 

Sarah is a great garden helper. She loved scooping the soil into the pots and helping me place the flowers. She has a couple of shows she loves to watch about flower gardening, and she can name most of the plants in our yard. 

Things starting to grow - big and miniature hollyhocks, pineapple lilies, ranunculus, roses, coneflowers, delphinium, dianthus, sweet peas, and some other things I don't know the names of. There are also irises and poppies that I transplanted from my grandparents' yard. I also have lilies of the valley that came from my other grandma's house. What better way to honor my two flower-loving grandmothers than to have some of their plants? I love it.

Things starting to bloom! It had been so long since we planted a lot of things that we weren't even sure what everything was. It was exciting to see what the plants turned into. 

We planted a mix of hollyhocks, and we ended up with these beautiful salmon and pink ones. The color was so pretty!

These miniature hollyhocks are one of my very favorite things we grew. They are like regular hollyhocks, but only about 2 feet tall with flowers about the size of a quarter. Cute!

Yellow and pink coneflowers

Not sure what these are. Gloriosa daisies maybe?

One day we caught this toad in the middle of the garden. Sarah was super excited about it. We released him into the vegetable garden, hoping he would work on our slug problem. 

Front Yard Flowers 2017

One of the most exciting things about making this house a home has been designing our landscaping. We all love flowers (especially Sarah. She is her mommy's girl.) These are the flowers in our front yard this year. A lot of these were perennials that we planted last year that are starting to mature and look amazing. We ended up with a really fun assortment of colors in the front.

After our crazy winter, these crocuses were a very welcome sight. There is something magical about planting bulbs in the Fall and seeing them pop up in the Spring.

Happy Columbine. We have several colors.

This rose was so cute and little at the beginning of the summer. Wait until you see it a few months later.

larkspur

There is a nursery outside of my hometown that sells the most amazing flower baskets for really good prices. I had one on either side of the door.

The zinnias in this pot went crazy. I think they loved getting the extra water from the basket above them.

Our shasta daisies were amazing this year. We went from one bloom last year to probably 75 this year. Daisies are the happiest flower.

We bought this bee balm having no idea what its flowers would look like. They have turned out to be one of my favorites. They remind me of truffula trees, and they kept blooming all summer. 

Shade Garden

The only shady spot in our yard is between the house and the fence on one side, and we were excited to make a fun little secret garden there. Last year, we put in the arbor and planted a chocolate vine to climb up it. Then a new house was built next to us, and when they built that lot up higher than ours all of the water started draining into our side yard. Every time it rained or the neighbors turned on their sprinklers, we had a flood. We had planted a lot of flowers there in the fall, and they were all drowned. We were not pleased.

On a happier note, our Nelly Moser clematis is happily growing, and we planted a wisteria on the other side of the arbor that has so far avoided death by flooding.

More flood carnage.

Apparently impatiens don't mind being flooded. They flourished all summer. Maybe we just need to research swamp plants.

As an experiment, we made a flower bed along the fence and filled it with wildflower seeds. It was so fun! There was always something new popping up and blooming throughout the summer. 

I don't know what these little guys are, but I love them!

We built a flagstone path down the center, and we are working on the flooding problem. We are determined to make this garden adorable!

Chris isn't quite as helpful in the garden as his sister. He tends to attack any flowers that he can reach. He sure does like to get dirty, though!

Chris: 11 Months

This little stinkbug is 11 months old!

Chris at 11 months:

• Mama's boy. Exclusively. If Mama leaves his sight, he gets very angry.
• Jabbers all the time. I'm claiming Mama as his first word. He definitely says it when he is angry and wants attention from me. He also says "Da-ey" pretty consistently when Kelson is around. 
• Gets into everything and puts all things in his mouth, food or not.
• Still loves water and the outdoors. He hates being left out of anything.
• His favorite food lately is watermelon. If we are having watermelon, we have to save it for the end of the meal or he won't eat anything else.
• Cruises around furniture and pulls up on everything, but he shows no signs of attempting to walk.
• Loves story time and has learned to turn the pages in his books.
• He is having a great intellectual growth spurt right now, and I see him turning into a toddler. Stay my baby a little longer!

 Trying to sneak a choking hazard into his mouth. Yep, that's our Chris.

 Chris might look a little silly in this picture, but I had to include it because it is so incredibly rare to snap a picture of Sarah with a calm, serious look on her face. No worries, she was back to her happy, silly self about half a second later.

Sarah wanted to take a picture too. Not bad for a 3 year old photographer.