Weekly Garden Photojournal

So I've pretty much wrapped up my gardening for the weekend. I may go out a bit later and water, but we had some decent rain last night, so it's not absolutely necessary, I don't think.

I'm still slacking on finishing the walkway project. That can wait (again) until next weekend. This weekend, we had more important team projects: erecting a rail fence that was my genius husband's idea, designed to make our yard look like it has visual barriers to keep wandering campers out. Also on the agenda was some maintenance-y stuff, and completing another section of back fence to limit the view our dogs have out of our yard and into the neighbor's yard.

So, here's what we done did:







I planted clematis and our solar lights at the posts closest to the walkway, to make it a little more welcoming looking for our regular visitors and ourselves.





(try not to mind the pieces of wood in the background of some of these pictures. It's leftover from the re-roofing they did to our house last week. When maintenance comes to plug our skylights, they'll use that wood back inside the house again).

I mulched around the stump, since the last of my bare-root plants are finally sprouting. My beautiful bulbs finished blooming, so I have them stashed back on the other side of the shed. The pot that's on top of the stump is growing what is supposed to turn into cascading white petunias.



I've planted the half of the replacement strawberries that have arrived. They were slow to perk up, but seem to be doing all right now. The other half have been in transit now for 18 days. I don't know how well they're actually going to do. If I can just get some started this year, I should be in good shape.




My front bed seems to be finally taking off. The Forget Me Nots are blooming, and everything else has at least sprouted.








In my rose bed, the Double Delight is just leafing it up. The Caribia is FINALLY starting to put out a few tiny buds, but you can hardly see them.





Still waiting for Blue Girl and my John F. Kennedy to wake up. My three climbers from last year are goners for sure. Not sure what to do with the corpses--have to remember to call the suppliers first.

As for the butterfly bushes, I weeded them and then mulched around them, after adding a clematis to the bottom of the wrought iron feeder hook. Look closely and you can see the two hummingbird feeders hanging from the hooks, too.






And, speaking of bird feeders, here's the second squirrel-proof feeder that I added to the yard, along with our original one. You can see Brian's newest addition to the bird attractions in our yard: an orange feeder to help attract some orioles that we have been hearing out in the wetlands. Look closely and you'll see the Downy Woodpecker helping himself to some black oil sunflower seed.





And finally, the project that caused the most consternation because we tried to do it at the heat of the day: adding a second fence panel to the original one we put up. Turns out the first one didn't completely block off our dogs' view of the beastie next door, so we needed a second panel. After some swearing and gnashing of teeth, we got it in okay, with only a few scraped knuckles to show for it. The yard slopes up fairly sharply, so we went as level as we could without some serious excavations. It's hardly professional work, but any barrier between us and the neighbors is a good one.



And that will be it for the rest of the week. Now, I desperately need to crawl through the shower and get clean.