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. :)

Why Do I Garden?

Randy over at Creating Our Eden posed an interesting question. How did you develop an interest in gardening? Well, I guess it kind of came natural with me. My grandmother is an avid gardener although my mother is not interested. I never really got into gardening much when I was younger. I thought it was all but a punishment to have to weed. I still don't like to hoe and rake, but at one point I remember realizing that I actually didn't mind weeding flowerbeds by hand. That was when I was 13 or so. I still didn't do it very much and never thought of actually planting anything. Then I got an office job. After about 2 years, my sister told me about a coffee house plant she'd seen at Home Depot. My company had just given us Home Depot gift cards and there was a bit left to spend, so I sent my card with a co worker and he picked up my coffee tree for me. That was my first house plant. It was just a little bunch in about a 3" pot when I got it. This is what it looks like now:

Well, the house plant was a refreshing and happy addition to my little office. He grew and brought me happy thrills with each new leaf. What a fascinating world the world of plants is! I remember being so gleeful and summonsing the whole office to come see when the first two leaves bloomed out. I even took a picture of new baby leaves when another branch started coming on:

So, what does all this have to do with gardening? I don't exactly consider house plant care as gardening, but it does give me a little piece of my hobby when I'm in the office. What this has to do with gardening is, that is how my love of plants got started. When that gets started, well we all know it's non-stoppable! A few years later my boss came and asked me to take care of a few plots with some plants. He told me to plant some things around the trees and make it beautiful. There was no limit to how much I could do. Truthfully, he's a better gardener than I, but I'm sure glad he let me do it. I was elated when he asked. Can you imagine being paid to do what you already enjoy?

I sure had a lot to learn and I still do. My first lesson was that bulbs don't bloom all year long. (Is that embarrassing, or what?) I was pretty much a novice on the subject, but I loved plants. I actually had a very pretty garden that year. My boss had his wife take me to a nursery and get whatever plants I wanted. She introduced me to SO many different things. I got lots of different things and put them in the ground. My second lesson was that you have to break up the root ball or your plants will get root bound in the ground. (Yes, that was embarrassing too.) I had kale that wouldn't grow because it was root bound.

My boss would have people bring me different plants and flowers so I could make it beautiful if he got to thinking I hadn't put enough in or was afraid to ask for more. :) This made so I had petunias, verbena, hyssops, lantana, rose bushes, desert rose, ornamental kale, and lots of other plants, that I developed a love for, in my very first garden. I don't think my love of gardening is going to grow old like some hobbies do. I love gardening. Weeding is so relaxing. You don't have to do any brain work to weed. You can just rip out the weeds and let your thought wander around without anything bad happening. (Good luck doing that in an office.) So anyway, that's why I garden, and that's where I got started. (Now I just need to figure out how to do it more.) Thanks for reading. Happy Gardening!

New Gardening Gloves

I mentioned in an earlier article that I had to get some new gardening gloves. I bought a 5 pack from Costco for about $17. They're Wells Lamont brand:

These are just your standard everyday knit gardening gloves that you can buy about anywhere other than that they have little dots of rubber on them. They call them Dotted Jersey Gloves:

I've never been disappointed with a pair of knit gardening gloves other than the fact that they don't usually last a whole season. This next pair they called Latex Coated Knit Gloves. They're supposed to be better because the sticker-burs aren't supposed to poke through them. I'll have to let you know if I end up having any troubles with them:

Then they had some Nitrile Coated Knit Gloves with double dipped finger tips for extra finger nail protection. Good! I never like to break a nail. :D

This pair of gloves looks as if I'm planning on having a sword fight with them. They called them Leather Palm Garden Gloves for heavy duty use. I liked them for pruning rose bushes since our bushes are extra thorny. Good thing they're green or they might have been appropriated for use with my father's Jeep for winching! (He hate's green.)

I think I liked this last pair the best. I think it might be the little flower on the strap that fastens it tight around your wrist, or maybe it's the fact that they're machine washable. Then again, maybe I just like them because they look like they might last a season. They called them Synthetic Leather Gloves with LiquiCell Technology. That last bit means it's supposed to prevent blisters. I don't have enough time to spend gardening to get blisters anyway, so I didn't worry too hard about that. Here they are:

This is a little off the subject, but I've always wondered if those silica packages that came in things would swell up real big like those kinds you buy for house plants so I gave it a try. I dumped them into a cup:

The beads are tiny:

There are probably 100 of them in this cup:

I put plenty of water in for them to absorb:

Guess what happened....Drum Roll!

...Absolutely Nothing!!! Anyway, it was a nice experiment. :) I threw them out.

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... :)