Under-the-window Garden

When we moved in, I knew that I wanted a flower bed under our dining room window, but we didn't have time to dig the bed out in the fall, so Kelson planted the bulbs in the middle of the grass. Come summer, I hacked out all of the grass around the plants we had put there. Lamest job ever, considering that our yard has enough rocks to open our own gravel pit. The end result was a beautiful flower garden, though, and it was worth all of the work.

Cute miniature tulips that are hot pink with dark blue centers. 

Early summer plant babies

When they built our house, they demolished a landscaping island in the backyard. We found the pink rosebush somehow still growing in the middle of the yard even after being bulldozed. It is now thriving in the flower garden.

One of Sarah's garden jobs is deadheading. She loves cutting off all of the dead flowers. She might get some live ones occasionally, but that's okay.

Million bells (which looked amazing!), cinquefoil, coreopsis, and wallflowers. We bought a huge load of landscaping rocks and flagstones at a yard sale, which gave me lots of interesting things to put in my garden.

Everything getting bigger! Some of the things you see here are petunias, lupine, marigolds, daylilies, Mexican shell flowers, asters, verbena, and black-eyed susans.

Like in the center garden, we had no idea what half of the things were coming up in this garden. One of the things we were waiting for was a Chinese lantern flower. When this came up, we thought it was it and let it keep growing. It turned into this, which is definitely not a Chinese lantern. It was 3 feet tall with unattractive yellow flowers when we finally pulled it out. I have no idea what it was. Maybe a weed.

lupine

daylilies

Mexican shell flowers

strawflowers

We found these weird bugs on the strawflowers - like a miniature praying mantis. They were eating the little bees that were pollinating the flowers. We didn't like them.

Then we found two of these - big praying mantises. They appeared in September. They were too intriguing to look away from. We saw them catch bees and butterflies. We thought Sarah would freak out, but she found it totally interesting and always wanted to go look for the mantises, which hung out in this plant for a few weeks.