It's Been Raining...

And raining, and RAINING!

I was glad for these pansies that came to brighten my day. It has been raining for a LONG time now. I don't even know how long it's been. All I know is that it hurts, but we need it! Here in the desert, we don't get rain like this hardly ever. I'm surprised it's not snowing. I took this picture from my window. I don't care to be out in the cold. :P Anyway, how's life for everyone? :)

Missing My Morning Glories

I don't know how anyone else is feeling, but I'm missing my morning glories. They were SO lovely. The old dead vines just got torn down. Here are some pictures from a few months past. I think you'll agree that these were BEAUTIFUL!


I love how they get a little star on them and the center almost glows.

They are bigger than you'd think.


So while I'm feeling rough with the cold getting to every joint in my body, I can rest with this assurance...it's springtime somewhere! :D

Pretty Flowers Everywhere

My garden is SO pretty right now. I snapped a few pictures to share with you today. This first one is my pink Aster. Is this pretty, or what? This is the second year for this plant. It did get transplanted this spring:

This is purple Aster. It's the same age as the pink and also got transplanted the first of this spring:

I sure like Verbena. The purple and red flowers here are Verbena with the purple Aster in the background:

Here's some red Verbena:

This is a patch of white Alyssum. I love the petunias peaking through the middle. I just wish there was more of them. :)

Here's the full top tier of that garden from the back:

This is my rose garden. I love this garden. The foliage is so dense that weeds don't hardly even try to grow here:

Here's the pretty corner of this garden. It looks so beautiful here:

I took another shot since I love this corner so much!

This is a (I think) watermelon plant that came up volunteer. It adds a nice enough effect that, even if it doesn't grow any melons, I left it there:

I was amazed at how these petunias climbed up this wall by sneaking up behind the fencing:

This is a view of the Lantana (that came up from last year) and roses from the top of the stairs:

I'm expecting the mums to burst forth into color any time here now that it's cooling off. I've had a lot of good times gardening this year. This time of year it really feels like it's all paying off. :)

Sweet Williams

I was able to get a few fabulous pictures of my beautiful Sweet Williams:



I just love these flowers, and they smell so....well, sweet! :)

My New Vases - Repaired

I was given 2 of these vases that were cracked because they were in an unsaleable condition. One had 2 of the feet clear broken off. The other just had one foot cracked. This article will show the one that was cracked. This is the box it came in:

If you ask me, that's an awful picture of it on that box. It's way prettier in real life. Here are some pictures of the damage. It's made of cast resin so it broke pretty easily:



I pulled it out a little:

And put some glue in the crack:

Then I pushed it up tight and held it for a little while:

All better:

Isn't it beautiful?

No vase is complete without flowers. I got my gloves on and clipped a few:

I love cut flowers. I added a few more to fill up the vase since it's pretty big. Isn't this a nice home improvement?

I didn't put flowers in the other one yet, but they look nice on either side of my headboard.

Weeding the Corner Garden

The corner garden; haven of peace, refuge of safety, and retreat of calm, sublime, serenity...if you're a weed. I have a huge problem with grass in this bed. Here's a picture of before I got started weeding:

You can see that there are by far more weeds than there are flowers. Good thing I think weeding is recreation after a day in the office, right? There really are some flowers there among the thistles:

I don't weed without gardening gloves. Maybe I've got just a little too much feminine in me so I don't like to get my hands dirty, or maybe I'm just too lazy to spend the next 10 days digging mud out of my fingernails. I don't know. Maybe it's really because I'm afraid someone's going to send me a message on my BlackBerry and I don't want to get dirt in it, just rip off the gloves and text away. :) Anyhow, so I got out my trusty butterfly glove (by the way, by the time I was done weeding this garden I had to throw that pair of glove away because they got a hole in them) and my metal hand shovel and set to work:

I got that shovel from the gardening club free as a test product or something. It was advertised as a transplant shovel. I got a hard plastic Fisker shovel from them too, but I like this metal one better since it's a lot sharper because the metal's thinner. It took me several days to weed this lovely garden, but I enjoyed every minute of it. How can you not when you find such pleasent surprises as this Violet Candy Tuft Plant that I didn't realize had actually come up:

Or these beautiful candy cane petunias:

Or lovely purple and pink petunias:

Look at this mammoth pile of weeds I got every night:

I'm not sure what the pink flowers (I like to call them fireworks) are here, but the white ones are baby's breath, if I'm not mistaken:

These blue petunias sure are lovely, wouldn't you agree?

I simply can't stop cooing over how lovely the sunset was this night:

Is that one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen, or what? I just love it. I think it has a very good chance of being my next crayon art subject. Another day, just before sunset, the clouds were so gorgeous:

And when sunset came....you can form your own opinion on this one:

That same day it sprinkled a little while I was out there, and a piece of a rainbow showed up:

Here's another sunset picture from that night:

The weather that day was especially meaningful to me for personal reasons. I really enjoyed my weeding! I think it took around a week to finish, probably a little less, but here are the end results:

Yes, those are a few more weeds there around the power pole. Don't worry, they're gone now. I went ahead and snapped a picture after all the weeds were gone, just for good measure. ;)

All the flowers and the tomatoes in this garden were grown from seed by me. Those are cherry tomatoes on the end away from the street. I think the sunflowers peeking over the fence from the neighbors sure add to the effect...especially next year when I'm weeding them out of the garden again... :)