Look at cute little Luke!
Our tree fattened up a little.
Our snowball bush got a little fuller
And our weeping cherry.
I realize this would be a lot more exciting if I fast forwarded 20 years to when they're mature.
The front border of our property was looking rather pathetic this spring.
Mark planted two new butterfly bushes between our three existing ones where there were big gaps.
The summer brought a lot of rain and our established bushes took off.
See that shrimpy little yellow thing in the lower left corner? We really want to put a Japanese maple there, but waited a couple of weeks too long and now the nurseries aren't carrying them until next year. It was either going to be that or a blue spruce, but we could never find a dwarf variety.
We planted some annuals in pots at the beginning of the summer, and I let Madelyn have her own pot (the gray one) and she chose the flowers. She helped me pot them, stood up and took two steps, tripped and her pot of flowers went KERSPLAT upside down on the grass. It was the end of the world, I am telling you. We had to salvage what we could and buy some new ones.
We didn't plant quite as much in our garden this year, because it got so overgrown last summer. We had strawberries and mint that had survived the winter, and we planted lettuce, carrots, one cucumber, one big tomato and two little yellow pear tomatoes.
It still got freakishly big! We had rain nonstop. Our tomatoes soon got too big for their cages and crashed onto their sides.
It sort of got to the point where it was out of control and I gave up, haha. There are a lot of bees that come for the sunflowers, which we actually feel good about, ecologically speaking. But it freaks the kids out. And I get contact dermatitis if my skin touches plants, so even going out to pick strawberries or tomatoes or prune anything is tricky. So it just grew like a jungle!
Luke loved the lettuce. He'd eat the big leaves of it plain.
We have Quinalt strawberries, but they look more like more small, lumpy wild ones. We're going to try a different variety next year.
We had a lot of mutant carrots. They were all twisted around each other. I guess I should have thinned them? I have no idea what I'm doing! I have them to my mom and she juiced them.
The cucumbers we got this year (slicing cucumbers) didn't do as well as the burpless ones we got last year. They sort of rotted out. Maybe it rained too much for them.
Our tomatoes have been going like gangbusters. We've had to give away about four bags of them. The little cherry tomatoes replanted themselves from seeds that fell in the gravel next to the planter box last year. They are SO good. They are the Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, and the big ones are called Heat Wave. We've been eating a lot of BLTs.
I was happy to see my anemones come up from the bulbs we put in last year.
Our tulips had a good showing in May!
Our peonies (which came back from the dead) got bigger but didn't flower.
We had some wild sunflowers that came back from last year, and I also planted a package of an autumn colored sunflower seed mix.
I LOVE SUNFLOWERS.
Have I mentioned? They are my favorite. They were in my bridal bouquet.
We ended up with some awesome colors!
We had a lot of hummingbirds this year. They are feisty little things!
Today I finally did something I should have been doing all summer and cut some flowers for the inside of the house.
The flowers in this bouquet is made with pink sedum, purple and white wildflowers (from a wildflower seed mix), fuchsia butterfly bush blooms, red heather, baby's breath and lavender stalks.
I really should have gotten married in the summer so I could have just picked my own flower arrangements like this. I think I'll start dropping hints for my sister Meg, who should be getting married sometime in the next 5 to 7 years. GET MARRIED IN THE SUMMER, MEG.
