Garden Garden

It is all about the garden at the moment. 

On the heels of the tulips...

come irises  

and the alium will be next to bloom. 

The violets are still blooming. I can also give an update on the violet recipe experiments. I ordered some of the violets which are intended for these recipes. But they haven't arrived yet! I'm so upset. Not only that but I can't get a hold of the nursery to get an idea of when to expect them. I do hope I haven't been swindled. 

Even though I have the wrong violets I do have some beautiful results from my experiments: 

 

Violet water. What a lovely color. 

The same flowers in vinegar yield a completely different result.

The two together...

 

Last week it was time to go to Greens Grow, the local, wonderful organic nursery.  I needed plants such as herbs, tomatoes, soil, compost and that sort of stuff. It's not quite time for some things to go in the ground (tomatoes), other herbs can be potted. I decided it was time a good time to do that and also to plant some seeds. 

Can you spot the kitty in the picture below?

 

He is there, the Inspector, with his ears sticking out from behind the tomatoes.

There was such a nice inviting box for him to sit in until something in the compost pile caught his interest. When he came back from inspecting, the sunflower seeds had been planted and placed in the box for safe keeping.  He made room...

Nice that he can share..

   This weekend's project was a long time coming. The previous weekend I had worked of pulling out a row of bricks next to the porch. There wasn't enough room for proper flowers. The daffodils and a few tulips came up, but some of the bulbs had been caught behind the lattice.  Taking out one row of bricks gives me an extra four inches grow stuff. Hot Dog!

 

So I yanked the bricks out, replaced the border bricks, pulled weeds as I went then mixed compost from the nursery with some cow manure and organic topsoil into the sad sandy soil that is what I have for flower garden there.  

 

The other nice side effect was the addition of many nice full sized bricks to my stash-o-bricks for other projects.  

Here's the walk all put back together including some marigolds.  Hardly looks like anything happened doesn't it? Well, trust me there was a lot of work to make it look like that. 

This weekend I decided to dive into the next brick project: fixing the bricks at the back of the porch. 

I've been wanting to do this since I moved in, but there were always more pressing (read "fun") project needing to be dealt with. 

 

This second area is totally overgrown with plants. The bricks only go to about half way across the porch steps. The rest is dirt. But now have more bricks to work with! Also on the list of things to do is deal with the rain run off. You can see my Jerry-rigged contraption there. Don't knock it - it works! But it sure does make it hard to use the stairs.

In the green pot are some peonies that are finally blooming again this year! If you don't know this - Peonies do not like to be moved. I moved these a few years ago and they haven't bloomed since, until now.  So I'm not even going to breath on them.  They are staying put. 

The easy part is pulling the bricks up. Trowel, shovel and elbow grease. No problem.

THEN - the dirt has to be leveled out. I did quite a bit of digging and moving and smoothing until the ground was level and flat. It still wasn't perfect but it was good enough for me. 

I started putting the bricks back and decided to extent them all the way to the basement entrance. 

I had a lot of help from the Inspector. 

I finished right as it got dark. Which was a good time to finish because that also let me know that the lights on the motion sensor were out. So out came the ladder and light bulbs to be changed. 

I'm pretty satisfied with the work. It looks like someone could actually walk on it.  

The next morning when I peeked out my bedroom window - it still looked good! That's always a plus.

Now the mental debate begins... work on the rain spouts or the next thing I really need to tackle, replacing my "deck" with something better. Not sure what will get priority yet.