The View From Our Place and Request for Garden Help

I hope you had a lovely July 4th holiday. On Friday I went to visit my mom and do some errands. We stayed home for the rest of the weekend and worked in the yard and garden. Even though we worked hard, we did manage to have a bon fire and grill some hamburgers. Here are a few photos taken after all the hard work was done.




Here's a shot of what I think is Purple Salvia at the corner of the front porch. The hummingbirds love it. Speaking of hummingbirds... All of the nesting hummingbird pairs on our property have had their babies and boy are they ever hungry! We are going through about 8 cups of sugar water a week. I just love sitting out by the feeder watching them swoop in for a quick meal.

Here are the two tomato plants we are babying. These are the plants I picked up early in the season (which for us is the 2nd week of May). I planted them up close to the house so I could cover them each night. The left one has really taken off and has several clusters of green tomatoes. The right one took some mole damage and half the plant is down. It also didn't help that I planted this guy too close to a mum, so it didn't get as much water and nutrients as it needed.A couple of weeks ago we dug it up and put it in a bucket to prevent the moles from further damaging the roots.

See the rustic trellis? George made two of these for me this year. We've got morning glories coming up at the base of each leg. Usually we sit just to the right of the large tomato plant and watch the hummingbirds at the feeder.

See this giant round circle of dirt. The previous owners used this as their fire pit. It's about 14 feet in diameter -- they must have had some really big fires. Nothing will grow there. I mean absolutely nothing. We even transplanted some weedy type grass and it's not taking off.

I need your help.

This weekend we finally decided to give up on trying to grow grass in this area and that we (I) could do whatever I wanted with it. Here are the two things I would love to do with this space

1.) Fill it in with mulch (or stones) and then put a piece of old fashioned farm machinery in the center. On the sides will be small 1/2 whiskey barrel tipped on their sides with mounds of wave petunias spilling out. Go here to see plantings similar to what I'm talking about. You can go here, here and here to see the old farm machinery I'm thinking of.

2.) Fill it in with mulch (or stones) and then put an antique wagon in the center. I would then fill the wagon with all kinds of flowers, making sure to include some vines that would trail down the sides to the ground. Go here, and here and here to see this kind of a wagon, this one looks like a manure spreader, but it would do.

The key here is to have some kind of vertical element. Preferably something that says "old fashioned country life" and lots of flowers. In the fall it would look so nice to do a harvest theme with corn stalks, straw bales and pumpkins. The only problem is I don't have any old wagons or plows lying around. I plan to check with all the neighbors to see if they know of any, and I'll run an ad in the local paper. I thought about asking George to make me a wagon, or at least a very large wheel borrow out of old wood, but his free time is very limited right now.

Here's where you can help -- please share any ideas of how I can make this circle a showpiece and creative ways for obtaining the supplies. Please leave your ideas in the comment section or email me. Thank you!

I couldn't resist sharing this beautiful fountain with you. George's brother David bought this fountain 3 years ago in anticipation of giving it to us as a wedding gift. After he painstakingly painted it, he filled it with water and plugged it in to see how it looked. David decided he liked the fountain so much, that he left it up for awhile to enjoy before shipping it off to us. During this time his neighbor was dying of cancer; one of his neighbor's small pleasures in life was sitting outdoors enjoying the garden and listening to this fountain.

One day the neighbor told David how much he enjoyed hearing the sound of this fountain, so David promptly brought the fountain over to his neighbor's garden and hung it close by so he could enjoy the sound and the beauty of the fountain. When David gave us this fountain he was apologizing for it being used, we are delighted to know our wedding gift brought so much happiness to someone in their last day. I think of that man every time I look at it.

Here's a shot of our beds on the side of the house. This year I'm doing impatiens and begonias in various shades of pink. Hostas are in the back. This weekend I snagged several pots of wave petunias at half off on the clearance rack at Lowes, so I put those into hanging planters. Hopefully the get growing fast -- I'm about a month behind on getting those started.

This is the area behind our garage. It is covered in pretty heavy shade for most of the day. We are going with all shade plants back here -- impatiens, jack-in-the-pulpit, hosta, and a few others that I don't know the names of. We would like to do ferns too, but the ground doesn't stay wet enough.

Here's Barney wanting to come out and help. The mosquitoes are so bad right now that they will just about eat you alive. George and I wear long sleeves, pants, hats, and sometimes a hooded sweatshirt if we can stand the heat and all the bug spray we can handle. We can't exactly dress Barney and then dip him in bug spray so he stays inside a lot of the time until the mosquitoes aren't so bad.

I just love the hydrangeas in the foreground and the blue something-or-others in the background. Can you tell I'm not real big on plant names?

This weekend, we picked our first mulberries and blackberries. I'm going to use this recipe and make a blackberry-mulberry-rhubarb crisp today.

Here's our work clothes hanging on the line. You can always tell how good of a day you've had by how dirty you get. Well, maybe not always. Now that I'm a grown up, I have lots of good days that don't involve getting dirty. When I was a little kid I measured how good my day was by how dirty my feet got. My sisters and I used to get so dirty that Mom made us site on the side porch and scrub our feet with a brush and soapy water before we could come in to bed. Those were some very good days indeed.

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