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.