Between the rain and the long hours working I haven’t gotten to check out my new roses blooming but I grabbed a quick picture as I got in the car this morning. The grass was too wet to get close so it’s a distant picture 🙂
We’re planning to have a great weekend. Aimee and Jason are coming out, we’re going to get the bathroom finished up (minus the actual door being done) and we might hit Rock n’ Ribfest. We have tons of around the house projects we can work on, I can’t wait.
I was poking around the garden for a few minutes when I got home – just as it was getting dark and I noticed a few things…
First – the roses from last year look awesome. I even cut 2 new pink blooms to bring inside as they go die so quickly outside and need to be pruned anyway after they’re dead.
Second – the grape vines that I thought were dead (looked like dead twigs in the ground) have green leaves! They’re not dead.. this is a horrible picture but as I said it was getting dark so I had to use the flash.
And in my perennial garden that mom planted last year I have 2 plants that I can not yet identify – no flowers. This area does not get as much sun as they need probably but based on the diagram here:
http://groudasfamily.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/perennial-cutting-garden.jpg
They could be either daisies, black eyed susans or echinacea. I took some pics in case Mom could identify them for me:
They are different than each other that’s all I know 🙂 Now i need to run outside quick to water the veggies while dinner cooks!
I came home last night to a wonderful sight – my light pink roses are popping!
The azalea blooms are dying off but the rest of the garden looks wonderful, even the marigolds in the vegetable garden are giving off some great color.
It’s so nice to have something pretty to come home to. I finally ran the vacuum through the house last night – it was just getting gross, probably haven’t vacuumed since I had friends over the first weekend in May. All’s better now though!
I went out to water the garden before work this morning and noticed that one of the rose bushes is in bloom! Nice and early! What a great way to start the day – just had to share:
Tonight I hope to be home at a regular time and get the trim in the bathroom painted so we’ll finally see what color we picked out for all the trim (Linen White).
I was going to keep things simple this year in the garden area because I just didn’t have time but I’ve been wanting to do a vegetable garden for years. So when I first started out yesterday working on the gardens it was with the intention of moving a few flowers around (hopefully they’ll survive their transplanting). One rosebush died so I also wanted to replace that.
So I spent hours diggin up grass to extend the garden bed then I ran to home depot. Later I continued extending the bed because I had bought a few more plants and had a few I had purchased at BJ’s previously that I decided to plant – although they don’t look so good so we’ll see if they are alive or not.
And for the pictures…
Just went with a few herbs (oregan, basil and rosemary) and some veggies (2 tomatoes and an orange pepper) then some flowers and marigolds (keeps the bugs away from the tomatoes hopefully).
We’ve decided to switch to a black mulch this year (and from now on) so I ended the evening last night mulching. I still have 2 bags and have to really weed the perennial garden before I mulch it. I also want to plant mint and lavender along the driveway but that may be a project for next year, we’ll see!
Finally a little time in the gardens! This weekend we traveled back to NY to visit some family. We had lunch with Ryan’s sister, then dinner with his mother and stayed the night at my parent’s house. When we got back home it was still nice out so I headed out to the gardens to get the first spring weeding done and reveal what plants survived the winter! Then I picked up the yard so we could mow this week.
First up – my perennial garden, surprisingly I got quite a few plants back this year. I’m not seeing any sign of a few of the plants but it’s still early so I’m not giving up hope. Plus i think I kept a few weeds because they looked pretty right now and I wasn’t sure what we planted.
The Epimedium (there are 2) is really blooming.
I’m taking a quick review of what we planted which can be seen here: Perennial cutting garden. It looks like both Epimediums (2) survived as well as all Mountain Bluets (3). Lily of the Valley survived but I thought it was a weed so I weeded it back pretty strongly (my neighbor has it there too), it will grow in again most likely.
I didn’t see the Valerium (2) coming in – but I don’t really know what it looks like so I may have weeded it out. Actually I just looked at a picture and that one may have been coming back but if so it was popping up all over the place and already blooming (seems too early?) and I thought it was a weed (oops) so I pulled it out.
The chives (3) are coming in very nicely and the Bergenia (1) came back too. At least one Dark Geranium came back (maybe both).
What I didn’t see coming back were the daisies and the black eyed susans. I also don’t know what the Echinacia looks like so i couldn’t’ tell that one. I’m going to keep an eye out on that side of the garden, I did not weed as strongly over there knowing I didn’t see the plants yet.
And the rose garden. These i weeded and cleaned up a bit. 3 of the 4 bushes are coming back beautifully. One has no buds yet (white roses), I’m not giving up complete hope yet because it was such a late bloomer and budder last year but it may not have survived. The silvery plants I cut back because they had new growth in the center and were a little unwieldy. We’ll see if my efforts destroyed them or helped them.
The raspberry bushes came back very strong, I cut out some dead wood and removed some of the baby plants that were too close to the lilies. 3 of my lilies are coming back! I don’t’ remember if i planted 3 or 4. They look great so far! I’d like to reorganize some of my perennials from the roses side and put them in front of the raspberries to tie the two gardens together but so far no time!
After gardening I headed inside to continue the vacuuming of the demolition area. I got it pretty cleaned up, enough so we can now use it and I started moving some tools and trim in there. I’ll continue this progress each night, my goal is to have the tv room set up as a proper livingroom for company by Friday night!
The very first blooms in my garden have started popping up! If we only had some sun this week there would probably be more, I’m hoping sun tomorrow will really open these guys up!
The first of the rose bushes to bud and then start to bloom!
The first of the asiatic lilies to bloom!
Now back to the regularly scheduled programming 🙂 This weekend we plan to continue work on the house – cleaning out some pipes from the basement, probably finishing off some aluminum siding removal (porch and one lower side of the house where we’ll be swapping out the windows). We also have to go buy windows tomorrow!
