Weekend Wonders

We went to my folk's this weekend. It was a fun time of garage sale-ing with Dad, and a relaxing walk through the garden with Mama. I love love love the aqua blue melamine cup hanging on the tree. It's from our family dishes when i was a girl. In the summer we would pour kool-aid in the cups, stick spoons in, and freeze 'em for popsicles.

Yard Crashers

Last week we worked for several days on the front yard. More digging up of plants and weeds, prepping and laying landscape cloth, and barkdust. We dismantled the old water garden and used the rocks for edging to discourage runoff on the sidewalk. Monday, another beer can chicken went on the grill. That and a Texas peach cobbler fed us for the next few days, since I had no further inclination to cook when I came in from carting rock.

Invasion

We're still cleaning out the front yard. Several years back we tore out our front lawn which had ceased to grow due to cedar trees (which continued to grow) densely shading it. We put in a large flower bed, and turkey grit gravel path, and bistro table area. The flower bed has been a nightmare. It got me thinking about it's correlation with life. Sometimes, our best laid plans, seemingly things that are "OK", can encroach on our lives......little by little. We don't even notice, until they are overwhelming us. They don't know their place and infringe into areas where they don't belong.....
Like this patch of "forget-me-nots" which had jumped the border and were 2 feet into the gravel.
Sometimes bad stuff infiltrates, and before we know it...it's got us bound in it's grip.
Vigilance is needed in weeding out our gardens....and our lives.
It's no secret that the hardest things to clean out are the ones that have been there the longest, and have sunk their roots in deeply.

It's a Jungle Out There!

There is a lot of difference between a Cottage Garden and a Weeds gone Wild garden. Yikes. Who knew all that casual look required a little Miss Marple to work in it....24/7?? It's just not feasible around here. Our life is too fragmented for that. We are busy cleaning out the works, and going for a much cleaner look, with easier upkeep. Larger plants like the hydrangeas and ferns can stay. Flowers are going into pots.

Because....making your way through jungle high blackberry vines, dandelions, dock, and grasses,
is reeeeeally tiring.

Spring!

Jim brought me home pansies from town the other day to:

*note to Martha*

Chin up! That abominable snowman has got to take a siesta soon!

Toe-may-toe, Toe-MAH-toe,

I just love my new kitchen towel from Jen. I thought it was going to be our ONLY red tomatoes this year. I finally brought in a ripe one from our kitchen garden yesterday. My Mom always said "It's going to be another GREEN tomato year"....(every year they lived in the valley, if I remember right.) If you too are "blessed" with a green tomato year, might I recommend the Farm Girl's Green Tomato Relish recipe? I've made it a couple of years now.

It's particularly good on breakfast burritos, of scrambled eggs, slivered Canadian bacon, sauteed onion, and cheese, wrapped in these:

I really prefer these wraps to standard flour tortillas. Try 'em, and see if ya don't agree.

Greenhouse Thyme

On our way to the coast, we stopped at one of my favorite nurseries. I think Mom and "the girls" are fans of it now also. There is a greenhouse tropical oasis and I found a new appreciation for Passion Flowers. In the past, the ones I had seen, had been rather pale and anemic looking lavender and yellow numbers. I hadn't been impressed. I don't know what variety these are, or the Latin name, but these little beauties really caught my camera's eye. I call them "Nature's Kaleidoscope."

Passion Flowers have been used herbally in treating anxiety and seizures, which would've come in real handy last night when Jim and I were caught up in a construction zone traffic snarl FOR AN HOUR at 10:40pm. Note to self* Don't tell hubby you can't wait to get home into your own cozy bed, that you're so tired you feel nauseous.....Murphy's law evidently says 2 minutes later you'll be in a Traffic jam. ;)

I'm not sure what this next picture is, I think it's lovely too. I just call it "flower within a flower." Or the "three sisters flowers" This particular shot reminds me of a fairy tale from a favorite book when I was a little girl. It was a sort of wierd one about sisters that all had different #'s of eyes. So meet Little One Eye, Little Two Eye, and Little Three Eye....

Grimm, I know.

I think, Jen got not one, not two, but three of these beautiful angel trumpets. One in each of the colors they had.



They won't survive outside in our climate zone, and since they grow into the tree you see here in the foreground.....

I'm seeing either a new VERY large sky-light in her living room or the construction of a pole-barn greenhouse by her hubby, in the future!

Gilding the Lilies

This should read "guarding the lilies".
For the longest time, with our wet, did I mention wet?, WET, wet, spring, the lilies were in their tight little bud raincoats. And THEN the SUN came out and the lilies started opening like popcorn kernels!
I wish the pictures could do them justice...but they can't.

Which is really too bad; because I'm afraid they may be gone before my special guests come in a couple of weeks.

Guarded/captured here in photos..... the lilies, in all of their gilded loveliness

Mama's Garden