Category: gardening

Gorgeous

While we were on the east coast, our front yard started blooming in earnest. The rhododendron is pale pink, we have three lovely dark pink azaleas next to the walkway, five medium pink azaleas by the driveway (and one discordant purple one by my window that I’m trying to ignore), and many buds on one of the bushes next to the driveway. Also, the two hydrangeas are leafy and madly growing, despite the December massacre. It’s incredibly satisfying. We’ll see if they bud this year?

From the middle of the front yard:

Kevin caught a bee on the rhododendron with his macro lens:

And from the street:

You can see that the view and yard quite shaded due to the neighbors’ Japanese maple. (I’m actually standing next to branches that drape down to only two feet off the ground). Which brings up an etiquette question for all of you. You are allowed in Redmond to cut tree limbs and shrubbery that hang over your property, even if the trunk of the plant doesn’t belong to you. The trunk in question actually belongs to a rental house with four guys in it, and we’ve never met the owner. Do we just cut away the two offending branches, confident in our new tree pruning skills and equipment? Do we try to get the guys to give us the name of their landlord and ask permission? Any opinions?

First summer weekend

Here’s what this weekend looked like:


A book, an icy drink, and a duo of chairs carted around to a sunny or shady spot. On Saturday it got up to the mid eighties, and today was about six degrees cooler. There was sun screen, bare feet, and yard work. I cleared the side garden of weeds (you can see the nice clear patch above Kevin’s head), to prep for herbs, beans, tomatoes and zucchini. The lilacs (we have two in the back, and one in the front!) have bloomed. The flowers haven’t quite opened up enough to be able to smell them, but every now and then a breeze would carry the beginnings of lilac scent. It’s going to be wonderful in a week or so. (That smell will forever remind me of doing calculus homework – graph paper out with the windows open on a spring night. Funny how memory works).

Our rhododendron just started blooming. Here it is glowing in the afternoon sun:


I love the blue flowers in the foreground – they’re so vibrant and lovely. To the right you can see the Japanese Maple (top) and a fern (bottom), clearly not fazed by the recent pruning efforts.

We’re totally inundated with small (¼”) blue flowers. I don’t know what they’re called. They look like this:

(shot by Kevin with his macro lens), on a nine inch stem. The first few looked a little bit weedy, but lovely, and since then, they’ve taken over the entire rock wall. We decided that they could have the two ends, but couldn’t be in the middle. This photo is called “one minute before I ripped out the ever-present blue wildflowers”.

Much better:

🙂 You can see the irises starting to really shoot up in the back!! Half of them are transplants from last year, and half were here already. I can’t wait to see what we have! Also, the mini azalea has started to bloom – I love the pink. And our red primrose (bottom-left) is still going strong.

Mystery creature

What is this?

Every time I pull up a weed, I seem to find one of these guys underneath. They’re a bit over an inch long, and have a hard red shell. I suspect it’s some sort of grub or larvae, but I’m curious how worried I should be, since our soil seems to have reached saturation levels on these dudes. Any ideas?

Procrastinator’s handbook: How to plant Daffodils*

1. Buy a house in October.
2. Buy a bag of daffodil bulbs from home depot. Place in the new, spacious garage on a nice shelf.
3. Let sit ½ year. Until the flowers bloom through the mesh bag in the dark and cold out of desperation.

4. Guilt.
5. Plant in real soil under actual sunshine. Water.
6. Wait and see…

* also works for tulips.

The logic becomes clear

It turns out that our big white-flowered bush on the side of the front yard has a pink flowered twin in between the windows! It needed to be massively pruned, and it looks like we chopped off all of the buds but three, but next year will be so pretty!

It’s also making me appreciate some of the other shrubbery more. There are two bushes with these odd pink flutes on all the new growth. It almost seems like a tropical-leaning burning bush.

See here for a close-up. I’ve been sort of unimpressed, especially since they haven’t really been taken care of so they’re bizarre stunted little things. But now I see that they’re meant to complement those huge pink flowers. How pretty that will be! They just got a new lease on life. 🙂

Backyard flowers

I’ve been meaning for the last few weeks to get a picture though one of the windows in our living room. The flowers, top to bottom through the pane, are just so great, if a bit hard to capture.

From top to bottom that’s:

  1. Pink and red blossoms and copious moss on the fruit tree.
  2. Forsythia (the small yellow buds on branches underneath the pines).
  3. Pink buds on the mini rhododendron on the right in front of the forsythia.
  4. (Purple) Periwinkle all along the top of the steps.
  5. On the left – massive pink mystery flowers that have been blooming for three months – love them.
  6. Far right, above the grass line: some of the primroses I planted – these are variegated white and purple.
  7. *Mowed* lawn! You can see all of the motley grasses.
  8. Mini daffodils in pots in front of the window – I keep pulling the bulbs mid summer, putting them in ziplocs over the winter and replanting them once they start to sprout – this is year three and they were a bit late but now splendid.

And I wasn’t kidding about the copious moss…

And in the front yard, we have the prettiest bush. There has been a single bloom for the last week, but the rest of the buds are just oozing promise.

Kevin took this photo with his new lens (a treat to himself for his new job! Same company, new group, and he gets to manage people which is a whole new playing field.) – pretty awesome. I’ll try to get a sunny photo of the full bush one of these days, though it will be hard to get organize before all of those fat, full buds bloom. Any minute now.

Feeling more like homeowners!

With Spring seeming like an ever-more-likely prospect, we decided to get our acts together and work on figuring out a lawnmower. Especially with only little teeny bits of lawn, we both like the idea of a reel mower. I was particularly enthusiastic, since they take up less space in the garage and you don’t have to worry about storing gas (two major advantages!!). Plus, I could see myself using a reel mower, whereas anything gas-powered would only belong to Kevin.

Seems like now must be the time to buy, since we found a great option on sale for $99 on Amazon, and free shipping! Nice! It arrived on Wednesday, and Kevin assembled it today. All of the online compaints that there were a million pieces turned out to be overdramatc. Six bolts, done. Then we took turns taking it out for a test run.

Kevin was laughing at me and my random walk style of mowing – no neat lines here, and it cuts faster if you attack the tall tufts from all angles. It’s perfect, and the yard looks so much shorter – actually even! I’ve never mowed before. It’s always been either my dad’s or my brother’s job. But I’m all excited about how easy and non-intimidating this is. It’s nice to have a 10 minute task outside when you get home from work (especially with daylight savings only a week away!)

PS. Like our gorgeous pink flowers? They keep getting showier. Here’s a closeup:

I still haven’t figured out what they are, but I’ve totally lost my resolve on tearing them out. Too pretty, especially for the end of February when you need the color.

Crocuses!

I took a few pictures of the new crocuses in the morning before work!

Good thing, too, because by the evening they were gone, again. 🙁 Nibbled down to the quick, with only a few stubby leaves and flower debris remaining. I wonder which creature is eating them. We have a million squirrels, I’ve seen a few rabbits, and Kevin’s seen a cat. My money’s on the rabbit. I wish it would stop.

I found more buds out front, so I’ll have to be eagle-eyed, and more blooms, this time in one of my planters!

Hopefully these ones will be spared for a few days.

More Spring Updates

Our primroses on the kitchen counter continue to look so cheerful. They now have company in the blue pots on either side. Amanda and Brian left three quarters of a thing of garlic on the counter a month and a half ago. It’s been sprouting, and I finally planted it last week. It’s VERY pleased to be in a pot. The shoots are all about three inches tall, and they seem to grow more every time I walk into the kitchen.

I’ve been checking on the crocuses each morning and most evenings to see if they’ve bloomed – it’s always such an all of a sudden thing with them. I can’t wait to see what color they turn out to be. That surprise seems a little bit ruined since there’s lavender, yellow, and purple crocus petal debris all around the bulbs. None of the remaining ones seem damaged, but I’ll have to be extra vigilant if I want to see them flower, I guess. I wonder which creature decided to attack?

The hydrangeas in the front yard were severely cut back during the pruning when Kevin’s family was here. I’ve been worried about them since it really does seem like a lot to recover from. I checked today, though, and it seems my fears were groundless since there are green buds everywhere. Yay!

There are two unidentified bushes in the backyard with very neat buds. Any ideas what this is?

Or this?

While we’re playing “name that plant”, the entire corner of front yard erupted in what looks like two sorts of bulb.

Here are the closeups (click on them for even bigger) – any ideas?

And finally, the holly tree is still, incongruously, covered in berries and looking very Christmassy. Right in front of it, though, is a bush positively covered in buds. I was puzzling over it when I finally found one that had actually bloomed! I know this flower!!

We have a forsythia!