Plants and Such

So when I started this blog a little over a year ago, I mainly wanted it to be a place to show progress of my "garden". I don't know why but I LOVE taking pictures of my plants and comparing them to older pictures and seeing the progress. I just love watching things grow and change. So here are some updates of the current state of our yard, pots and garden ;)

This is our snowball bush out front. Last year it was pretty weak and bloomed nothing like it has this year! I see these bushes around a lot at other houses and these things can get HUGE! My mom even has one in her backyard. We will have to watch this as it grows and keep it in check. It sure is pretty though!

The completed side yard complete with new English Boxwoods, Firebushes, Lilac bushes and a small evergreen tree. There are also some red pointy plants we found that we love - can't remember the name right now. I think it will be neat to see how all of this fills out NEXT year and compare it to this picture right here!

Some of my potted plants on the front porch. I cannot believe how awesome the petunias are doing. Everywhere I planted them has been excellent. They just explode and fill out wherever they go. These plants have only been in their pots for about a month. I can't wait to see how they progress over the summer!

These pots are all in the backyard. I added in some of those cute small purple/blue flowers. I don't know their name but you see them a lot in manicured flower beds so I figured I'd see how well they do. They do like a lot of shade so that's why I planted them out back, we only get morning sun up close to the back of the house.

This is probably my favorite plant! It's my delphenium. We found this plant late last fall at Lowes. They were trying to get rid of all of their last plants and it was only $5!!! It only had a few flowers on it at the time and it was very scraggly looking. I knew I could take care of it and so we got it. I had no idea how awesome it would be once it started blooming! Right now it's in the pot on the porch, however I will end up transplanting it soon I think. I need to research whether it would be better to place in the backyard or someone in the front, it depends on how much sun it needs. Right now it is getting full sun all day and it seems to like it :)

This is one of two hanging baskets on the back porch. Ramin was nice enough to hang them up for me. In fact, he bought me these baskets a few years ago for Valentine's Day I think when we lived in our townhome so I could start my little potted garden. I love hanging baskets! I kind of wanted to do something different with these but I had so many petunias left that I had to put them somewhere :) I literally used all of my pots I had to accomodate all of the petunias I bought! Next year I want to try some Creeping Jenny in the baskets - it's an AWESOME plant that has long tendrils that flow over the side of the basket - I had them once before and loved it.

So here's where we get to the big surprise! The picture above is our East side of the backyard. You can see how horrible and overgrown it is. Well, on Saturday while Ramin and I were doing yard work out front, our neighbor who lives 2 houses down came over to offer some advice about our grass. We gladly accepted it and got to talking with him for a long time. He took us over to his house where his wife was doing some gardening. These people have a GREAT front and back yard - they took us back there to check it out. We were very impressed! The wife does a great job with the flower beds and has a ton of cool ground covers that she maintains fairly often. So she gave us a whole bag of newly pruned ground cover and told us to use it, which we loved! So that night we decided it was time to start doing something about that back yard. We thought it would be so much work but honestly it was WAY easier than we thought. When the previous owners did the whole curbing thing out back they actually put in awesome planting soil. All Ramin had to do was hack out the grass and break up the dirt with his pick and then I went over it all with the metal rake. Yeah there were some big rocks but we just thew those to the side and now you can really tell the difference it made in the bottom picture. The bottom is the West side of the yard after we did the work. It used to look like the East side! And all of the greenery in there now is all of the ground cover the neighbors gave us! I can't wait for it all to fill in and spread so I can transfer some to the other side :) What a difference eh?

So I'm done talking about my plants and such. I just love watching progression. Now that I have time to focus on things I know I'll gain more enjoyment from it. The last two pictures are just random ones I thought I'd share. Here is Lady and Belle and being cute. They lay like this a lot when Ramin and I are both in the office :P

Chris got a new toy called Bucky Balls or something :P They are super magnetic balls that you can shape into many things. Here we made Chris wear a headdress :P