Garden Glimpses - Part 1

With the rainfall we got here in Iowa in May and June, my flower and vegie gardens are going bananas!  I'm already harvesting vegetables that I usually have to wait until later in July to harvest and I have flowers that are blooming better than they have in years.

Some of the early blooms in our yard include:

Peach Iris (they were in my mother's flower garden)

I divided and moved the Peach Iris two summers ago and this summer was the first bloom since relocating them.

Grape Hyacinth

Flowering Almond

Some of the summer blooms came a bit earlier this year and some of them are really taking off this year better than ever before.  The mounds of Salvia are huge this year.

Purple Salvia

Pink Salvia

Peonies

Knock Out Rose

I'm afraid that after this knock rose bloomed and I took this photo, it went into a death spiral.  :(  That's the second one I've lost, the first to the harsh winter of 2013.  I'm not quite ready to dig it up yet.

We have a garden I call the "triangle garden" because its sits in the corner of our backyard.  It's my experimental garden where I plants things and see how they do.  I also like to add interest by placing a huge container pot on one side of the garden to help elevate the color in the garden bed.  This year I filled it with wave petunias and verbena and they really took off.


Container full of Verbena and Wave Petunias

We have a garden I call the "triangle garden" because its sits in the corner of our backyard.  It's my experimental garden where I plants things and see how they do.  I also like to add interest by placing a huge container pot on one side of the garden to help elevate the color in the garden bed.  This year I filled it with wave petunias and verbena and they really took off.

 

 

 

 I added a couple new pieces of "art" to this garden bed this year.  The first being a piece of driftwood that had been in my brother's yard for years that he got from Lake Rathbun and the second is a bicycle that wheel spokes turn in the wind that I found on Mother's Day at a farm/nursery south of where I live called Howell's Tree Farm.  As soon as I saw it, I knew it was coming home with me and the price was reasonable too!

I also have lot of flowers growing in this garden that haven't done as well in previous years.  The Columbine really took off and as spread twice as much as last year and the clump of balloon flowers in that garden doubled.

Columbine

Balloon Flower

There's also the new aster plant that I planted last year that has come back and thrived this year.

 

I love lilies of all kinds and have several varieties.  These Asiatic lilies in the triangle bed are SO gorgeous when they bloom.

 

I'll share more photos of our garden beds later.......the husband and I are heading on a long awaited overnight road trip tomorrow and I have last minute packing and stuff to do......

Thanks for stopping by!

*Dining Alfresco - Getting our deck ready for the season*

It's that time of the year where I bring out the things we use on our deck.  Cushions, pillows, planters, lanterns, candles, etc. and once the threat of snow passed, it's time to clean up and bring the stuff from storage.

We waterproofed our deck last year and I hate what it did to it, so I'm really hoping that it wears off this year so that next year, we'll do it right and with a better product.

I bring out the deck rug, cushion to my lounge chair & my deck poof as soon as I can but it's far from finished.

 

We keep our gas grill out on the deck year round and have been know to shovel a path through the snow in the winter to use it.  Those three container pots in corner are going to hold herbs soon.

 

I have a wire rack that I use out there and because it stays out there over winter, I usually have to touch it up with a few squirts of spray paint every year......this year was no exception.  I store a tote full of things that I like to display on that rack along with containers I plant with flowers that go on it.

This year I decided that I wanted to do something to the shelves of the wire rack besides touching it up with spray paint.  Since the shelves were wire, some thing were hard to stand up on them and I thought it could use some more weight.

I came up with the brilliant idea of thick wood pieces to act as shelves on top of the wire shelves.  So off to Lowe's I went and I came back with exactly what I was envisioning.   I found a 2 inch thick board that was 8 foot long, had Lowe's cut it to the dimensions I needed and I hauled the pieces home.

Here is one of the boards unfinished and one of them after I stained it using Minwax's Mission Oak.  It's a product that is both a stain & polyurethane.

 

 

After I was done staining, I also sprayed them with some Thompson Water Seal since they'll be outside.

 

 

I let the boards dry for several days before I went forward with the project.  In the meantime, I re-spray painted the wire rack and let it dry.

 

Once everything was dry and with the help of our son, I was able to move the wire rack back out to the deck and set the boards on the shelves of the wire rack.

 

Here's the rack filled with the planters and garden things I love.  There is a scented geranium planted in the owl planter and you can catch whiffs of it when you walk by.

 

 

This year I decided to dedicate this corner of our deck to mostly herbs with a container of petunias thrown in.  I've got chives (they survived the winter in the pot and started growing again), dill, basil, flat leaf parsley, thyme and mint growing here.  They do pretty good....lots of morning and early afternoon sun, but get a break from it in the evening.





New this years is my Hawkeye planter!  I had never seen these black & gold petunias until I was out at Canoyer Garden Center and saw them there.  I paired them with some yellow daisies.  This isn't the best photo of the planter and I think it will look better once it fills in.  I made the Hawkeye plant post myself using a post finial, black gloss spray paint, Herky stickers and sealant.....total cost...probably around $5 bucks.

 

This is a huge dish planter that I scored at IKEA years ago and I use it for herbs also.  I have Rosemary and more Thyme planted in it this year.

A view of where I like to camp out on beautiful days.  Because the deck sits on the east side of our home, it's can almost too hot and sunny in the mornings so I have to use an umbrella when sitting out there.  After 2:00pm, the sun is over the house the it's shaded the rest of the day and evening.

 

Here's where we like to dine when the weather cooperates.  I bought new chair pillow this year in a blue, green and yellow color scheme and they are just the right thing to support your back if needed.



Of course our deck wouldn't be complete without paying homage to one of our favorite things in the world.......cats!  Found this guy (made out of salvage auto parts) at our local farmer's market years ago and he still makes me smile with I see it.

Enjoy your week!  I'm heading to Texas to see some long time friends and whoop it up a bit!

Weekend Thoughts and Fun!

Obviously, I haven't got to the point where my week days meld into the weekends, but I have to say I like having my husband around, so there is a distinct difference there in those days.  :)

My first week off consisted of nothing more than homework, some house cleaning, pleasure reading, internet surfing (both research and fun stuff) and getting started on my upcoming garage sale.

This is the mess I'll be organizing this week along with a friend who is bringing her stuff over in the next day or so.

I'll be glad to get that mess gone so we can re-organize the garage for winter and then all three car will be able to park inside the garage.

I found a couple of great recipes this week while surfing and I'm definitely trying this one for lunch one day soon because everything is better with bacon.

Egg Salad BLT 

Husband and son do not like egg salad, so this one is all mine baby!

I also decided while watching football today that I'm use up some of the basil I have growing and make pesto.   Pretty darn easy but I wish those pignoli nuts weren't so damn expensive!

BTW - 2 cups of basil makes 1 cup of pesto and you can freeze pesto if you want, just pour a little olive oil on top of the pesto before freezing.   I used this recipe from the Food Network today for the pesto Basil Pesto ,only I used parmesan cheese rather than pecorino.   Plan on trying it out tonight when we have dinner......New York strips, corn on the cob, salad with Italian bread smeared with pesto......delish!........and then after dinner.......we're going to go see The Eagles.   Can't wait and I'll post pictures later.

~* Making Lemonade from Lemons *~

In a previous post I told you about our home owners association threatening us with legal action if we didn't remove this shed -

which by the way, is a lot nicer than a whole lot of other sheds in the neighborhood and development, but we're tired of dealing with the assholes, and that's exactly what those that sit on the Board of Directors are.....assholes.....power driven assholes (apologies to those of you that don't curse, but you might as well get to used to it if your going to read my blog), so last Sunday my brother and a friend of us came over and took it down.  I mourned it for about a day and then I said "SCREW THEM.....I'll figure out something to do with that area and there won't be a damn thing they can say to me"....so after one trip to Lowe's and scrounging around in my gardening stash, I turned that empty lonely concrete pad (which has our son's hand print from 2005 in it) to..........THIS

The potting bench was inside the shed, the small wooden bench is from my mother's porch that sat next to the shed, the terra cotta planter on the left was a gift brought back to me from Palm Springs by my Aunt and Uncle and I just snagged the bird bath on a Facebook For Sale page a couple of weeks ago for $15 bucks.....I don't like seeing the utility boxes that our shed hid from our view but this set up hides them a bit.  Next year I'll have to put my rabbit fencing all the way around the tomato garden on the right to keep those "wasskily wabbits" away!

I was pretty please with how we're using it right now and I feel like I made lemonade out of lemons.  I also feel like I'm giving the big old finger to the jerks that sit on our home owner's association board and that folks, make me smile.