I love summer

I love summer.
I love living in the country with a huge yard.
I love my flower garden.

Hope you are having a wonderful weekend.

I'm glad it is Friday.

Ellie is sick with a stomach virus. I'm waiting for the rest of us to get it. I don't think I got any real sleep last night. Coffee is my friend. That and hand sanitizer.

These little butterflies love the coneflowers. We have a lot of butterflies in the yard this year. I love it! I want to plant more flowers to attract them.

I have gotten so much joy out of these flowers. They are stunning. The row of them is almost 30 feet long.

I got the binding on my table runner done. I washed it up yesterday and one of the seams frayed. Ugh. I actually didn't even get very upset. I got my sewing machine back out last night and fixed it the best I could. I doubt anyone would notice but me. It's certainly not perfect, but I love it. I wish the brown fabric with the white flowers looked a bit better. The design wasn't printed on the fabric squarely. But it reminds me of my Mamaw Judy, so I used anyway.

Now I need a new project. I wonder if I can squeeze one more in before they start working on the dining room.

Flowers!

See the bee?

Another one. I love bumblebees.


These are the daylilies planted in the same garden.

The lilies are almost done blooming and the liatris is just starting to bloom. I'm hoping the lilies have more blooms next year. Some of the plants didn't bloom at all this year, but I wasn't surprised as we just transplanted them from John's Mom's yard last summer. I'm also hoping the grasses grow taller next year. We divided them all this spring, so they aren't at their full potential yet either. I'm still super happy with this garden.

When we get plants from other people, we stick them on the edge of the woods until we can figure out what to do with them.

Close up of the ones above.

Those are from John's Mom too. They are a beautiful dark pink in real life. They look sort of orange on my computer screen though. We're moving them along with some taller orange ones to near my new maple tree/poppy garden this fall.

Have a great weekend!

Yard/Garden 2010

Well, I didn't take pictures from the same angles, but who knows if I will ever have time to do that. Our yard is coming along! The part we mow is about 3 acres. Someday, I plan to have it half covered in gardens. Wouldn't that be something?

Spring 2009. Newly planted hostas and ornamental grasses.


May 2010. The hostas have grown so much! Ornamental grasses with newly planted coneflowers (one's blooming already!), daylilies, and liatris.

Another view. Our ornamental plum has grown so much!


Sadly, this is the best pic I have of it from when we planted it. September 2007.

In August 2007, Mom dug up all of her hostas and brought them to me. What a sweet Mom I have! She also stayed 2 days and helped plant them all.

August 2007

May 2010

Don't look too closely! I need to weed! This is just to the right of the center path.


Just to the left of the center path.

My planter boxes also look better this year than they ever have. I'll get a pic in a few weeks when they fill in a little more. I also want to get a picture of the coneflowers and daylilies blooming. I am so proud of that area. The grasses were from Mom (free), the coneflowers grew from seed ($10), the dayliles are from John's Mom (free) and the liatris are from Mom (free). It's a little sparse this year as I had to divide everything out to make it fit the area I wanted to cover. I have high hopes for it though in about 2 more years.

As much as I wish we could snap our fingers and have the inside of the house remodeled, I am glad we've spent so much time and effort outside. Walls may need painted, but plants grow! Getting them in and growing so that they can mature is more important to me that anything else.

We're planning to do one more "new" garden this fall by moving some more free daylilies. I'm also hoping Mom will come over and we can move and divide some hostas for that garden. I just yesterday dug up 60 compacted, non-blooming daffodils and need to get them planted back out with room to grow. We already saved 100 or so that were so compacted and sad that we weren't even sure if they were daffodils. They bloomed this spring for the first time!

More pics of the yard and gardens to come as things bloom (assuming there isn't a freakish hail storm that destroys everything for the year like last year).

Shhhh...they are sleeping.

Ellie was asleep by 7:30 and Mary by 8pm. Woohoo! I think John fell asleep with Mary. It's nice and quiet in here.

I've been thinking a lot about our home and property. We are so happy here. I'll never forget the first time I stepped into the house. We came by to see it in November 2006. The previous owner still lived here, but was kind enough to let us come see it. She sold the house to John's Dad and Step-Mom and we ended up buying it from them in June 2007. So anyway, we walked into the kitchen having no idea what to expect. The lady had several animals in the house, and it was very (to put it mildly) messy. But I immediately saw through the mess. I saw it as a home. It was cozy. Sure it needed a little TLC. But I loved it. I can't believe that was 2006.

We came back up here at Christmas and the house was empty. We took some pictures. We talked about putting our Evansville house on the market, and about what improvements we'd make to this house before we moved. John still had to figure out what he'd do as far as a job, etc. Anyway, here's a picture John took of the front of the house in December 2006.

Turns out those trees being SUPER close to the house were causing MAJOR erosion issues. So they got cut down, the house repaired and the downspouts re-routed. So when we bought the house, there was nothing around it as far as landscaping. I can see it in my mind though. We started by planting our plum tree in September 2007. Last year Mom brought some ornamental grasses and they are on the end of the house. Now I've planted a row of hostas on the side of the house. Yesterday, we mulched those two areas.

When the grasses are up for the year, I'll take another picture. I have a row of coneflower seeds planted in front of the grasses, but they haven't come up yet. Hopefully they'll be up this week.

Here's another area we mulched yesterday. I call it the daffodil garden. There are ferns from my Grandpa Joe's woods, columbine, some big hostas that my sister in law gave me this spring, and some small hostas I brought from Evansville.

Isn't this a cool picture? I took that around 8 in the morning, and by 10:30 it had bloomed.


These poppies are planted next to our new maple tree, on the opposite side of the driveway from the daffodil garden. The maple tree is the outer edge of what I call our "front" garden. But there's no garden. It's just in my mind right now. I want to completely change the front porch before we finish landscaping the front. Who knows when. Someday.

And here's the best before picture of the view as you pull up to the house.

See those planters outside the garage? The were completely rotten (they were old wooden barrels) and were actually being held together by the ivy.

Now, we have these BEAUTIFUL planter boxes that John made me when I saw something very similar in Cottage Living. I have pots inside, and I just got them filled with annuals on Friday.


You can see our plum tree (that's decided to grow crooked, we're getting ready to stake it back up and hope for the best. John thinks the wind comes over the house and encourages it to grow that way.) next to the house. I think it's tripled in size since we got it. The new maple and the poppies are off to the right, just barely out of the picture.

I'll try to take more pictures later this summer when my annuals are bigger and the grasses (and hopefully the darn coneflowers!!) are taller.

And now, some random pictures.

Mary and "Bippy" the turtle whose life was saved yesterday when John and Mary found him in the road on the way to get the mulch. Mary had never seen a turtle up close before. She and John took him down to the creek and he jumped right in and swam off. Mary named him Bippy. Yesterday afternoon and today I heard "What do you think Bippy is doing right now?" about 400 times. We'll never see Bippy again I am sure, but I do hope he's happy down in our creek.


The same poppy as above, this pic taken about 6pm.


The morning dew on one of the hostas up by the side of the house.


I hope we never move from here. I hope I have years with this house and yard to make it as amazing as I see it in my head. I hope the girls will love to garden as much as I do. I hope my Mom will continue to come over in the spring to help me divide and move plants. I hope that friends and family keep giving me their free, extra plants so that I can look at them and have memories of each person. Stay tuned and watch it grow with us:).

Blog posts in my mind

I spend time every day thinking about things I want to blog about, but by the end of the day, I'm too worn out to deal with it.

On May 6th, I wanted to write a post about how it had been 4 years since the day I got pregnant with Mary. Four years. Four years of being a Mom full time. Four years of either being pregnant, nursing, being pregnant AND nursing, and then nursing my two babies. A full time job. I wanted to write this beautiful post about how it's all changed me. But Ellie didn't go to bed until 9pm that night. And she's waking up probably 10 times a night right now (teething). And when she went to bed at 9pm, all I wanted to do was go to bed myself.

I could write an entire post about how dang tired I am. Really tired. Exhausted beyond exhausted. The same thing happened when Mary was teething. Up 10 times a night, sometimes more like 15-20. Ellie isn't nearly as bad about it. She doesn't cry all night, but she wakes up. And wants to nurse or wants her paci or wants me to hold her for a while. I feel like I don't sleep anymore. I feel like I get nothing done around the house. I'm too tired. All my energy is devoted to the girls during the day. Half the time, I'm pulling Ellie off Mary. Oh, Ellie loves to pull up on ANYTHING. Including Mary. Poor Mary. Or I'm fishing out tiny toys/old play-doh/dirt/old food out of Ellie's mouth. I must take 50 things a day out of her mouth. Who knows how much I miss. The other day I was doing a craft with Mary. I thought we were being really careful, gluing some buttons onto a picture frame. The next morning, I carefully opened up Ellie's poopie diaper and found.....a green button. Hmm. I saved it. It's going right in the baby book. I know that this phase will pass. Well, I hope it will. I think it will. I get NOTHING done around the house. By the time I get the kitchen cleaned up in the morning, Ellie's ready for a nap, then I need to cook lunch, then we go outside, then Ellie takes another nap. Then dinner. Mary goes to bed at 7-7:30 and Ellie's down at 8pm on a good night. And then I just want to go to bed. But I don't. I sit up looking at crafty blogs. I look at decorating blogs. I imagine the day when the girls are in school. Because NOTHING is getting done before that. I'm not complaining. Well, maybe a little. Mary's so smart and funny. I love hearing the next thing that is going to come out of her mouth. Today she helped me mulch the garden. She said "oh! Mom!" I thought something was wrong. "You know that good egg we had for breakfast? I want that again tomorrow." Huh? We're out mulching, it's 4pm, and she's thinking about breakfast. Okay.

Was I going somewhere with this post? Hmm. I'm tired. I think I already covered that though.

We've been working super hard outside. We got 2 "scoops" of mulch today, which completely filled the bed of John's truck. We got about half of it spread. Mary loves to help, and Ellie will sit and eat grass without needing too much supervision. I stopped every 5 minutes, and got the rocks/grass/tree bark out of her mouth and let her at it again. I'm hoping that I'll get some pictures in the morning of all our hard work. This is our 3rd summer here (moved here in June 2007) and I think it's pretty amazing how much we've done outside considering I was pregnant and miserable last summer and now we have 2 kids to entertain while we work. It's fun though. Really great. John and I both love living here so much. We love working outside too. Mary loves watching things grow and taking care of plants. She calls them her "buddies." The girls and I went to get our annual flowers and some potting soil yesterday and then planted them (I was in WAY over my head trying to watch a fussy 8 month old and an overtired 3 year old....WAY OVER). Mary said "oh, let's water these buddies! Let's help them grow!" Mary's been driving my absolutely crazy lately, but today we had a lot of fun while John watched Ellie. I think Mary and I are going to have a great summer taking care of our plants outside.

So that's it. A long, crazy post when I should be going to bed. Probably an incoherent post about nothing. Life I guess.

An evening walk

Every night after dinner, I walk the day's kitchen scraps out to the compost bin. This is the view of the yard walking back towards the composter.


Here's the composter. John made it out of blocks that the previous homeowner left here. Nothing fancy, but it works. The right half is for compost, and the left side is for burning stuff (sticks, limbs, etc, etc). On top you can see my stainless steel bucket for collecting kitchen scraps. The compost side has a lid (sheet of plywood with huge holes drilled into it so rain can get in), but it's off right now. The only reason we have a lid is because we have raccoons in our yard. But they seem to leave the compost alone so we haven't bothered putting it back.


Tossing in tonight's scraps. I put in fruit and veggie scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds (and filters), cat hair, human hair sometimes, wool yarn, and the occasional paper towel or tissue. We also put in items from the yard like grass clippings and leaves, etc as needed. I think it's looking pretty good this spring. I think we started this pile last July.


After I do the composting, I walk out and check on my hosta garden. This area was just part of the yard last summer when we moved in. We removed the sod, and John tilled up the area. Some of the plants are from my old Evansville garden, and some are from my Mom. I think they all look really good this spring, considering most of them sat in pots most of the summer and it was really, really dry here last fall. I have before pictures, but the odds of me finding time to upload them are pretty slim these days:).


See that dead tree directly behind St. Francis? John noticed on Saturday that a bird had made her nest there. So I took a picture of her last night.


There's a lot more of our property/yard to see, but it was chilly last night and Mary and I were about to head off to a La Leche League meeting.