3 - 2- 1 - bloom!

It seems like everything has bloomed in the last week or two, although really things have been blooming for months now.

Mystery flower in the back is doing very well and much healthier than last year:


The purple and white phlox are starting to bloom. They'll just slowly keep blooming for the rest of the summer:


This is a bit washed out, but these flowers are kind of bright pinkish-purple. They're on stalks probably 5 feet tall! They remind me of phlox, but they don't look the same quite. I don't remember them being here (in the front yard rain garden) last year. Volunteers I guess.


Another mystery flower. I think I might have gotten this from a neighbor and it was very small last year. This year it is quite large and spilling all over the bank into the rain garden. The flowers are like fuchsia or fluorescent pink. They are stunning.


Lots of Cranesbill (ie wild geranium) and it's flowering a lot this year.


I've been calling this wild geranium, but it looks nothing like the one above! Maybe it's just a different kind? I'm confused. I guess it goes back on the long mystery list.


Speaking of mysteries, these are the plants I swiped from the community garden path. They get tons of these little blue flowers and I just love them!


I have a million big purple irises that came from our neighbor up the block. The only ones blooming are in the back rain garden. They smell just like grape juice!


These are the columbines from our neighbor's mom. Very different from the ones I normally see around here. I can't remember if this is the "wild" variety or what it is that makes them so different.


The poppies started blooming a couple days ago. There are even more now - maybe you can see how many fuzzy buds there are in there. They don't stick around for long though. I don't think a bloom lasts for more than a day.


They are glorious:



More to come! Our peonies are going to bloom any day. Yay! Transplanting didn't kill them or make them stop flowering. Our rosebush just burst into bloom today. The yarrow is going to bloom any day. No sign of impending coreopsis blooming or coneflower or many of the various others. But I guess I wouldn't want it to all bloom (and fade) all at once anyway!

Garden pics

Just a quick shot of our garden. It's even a little bigger than this now, but I'm just happy that everything is finally in! Or at least out - of the house! We've finally turned off the banks of lights in the back hall and I'm hoping we'll be able to walk back there again someday.

North-side garden:


South-side garden:


Some day you'll get a tour of what is what...

Base jumping

Practice session #1:

go, go, go, go!!



Okay...not too bad. Red, we need to work on that jump.


Practice session #2:

go, go, go, go!!



Not bad girls, not bad. Red: come on now, you can do better. What are you? Chicken?

I am amazing

Sorry, but I'm really proud of this creation. It took me a couple days to make and it was all I could think about all day long. I wanted to skip meals, skip going out with friends, skip sleeping! I just wanted to get it done! It's probably the most complicated thing I've ever made and it was a brain exercise to do it. But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.



It's a computer bag. I haven't had a laptop for almost two years and it's been mostly okay. But lately, with a lot of different projects for both of us, it's harder and harder to get on the computer. We both always need it for one thing or another: writing, research, checking email, keeping records, etc. I was trying to figure out how I could get a laptop. Jeremy was talking with his brother and it turns out he had a computer he was getting rid of. Yay! He sent the computer to me and I immediately started thinking about how I could carry it around safely.

It came in a large box with all of this foam egg carton stuff:



I decided to make a little padded carrying case using the foam stuff and whatever bits of scraps I had around.



I used a jean skirt, jean pants, and some chicken fabric. The jean skirt had these fake pockets on the back so I made one into a real pocket to store the computer cords.

Here's the inside:



There are two pockets in the yellow chicken fabric.



This is the backside of the bag, which is made from the front panel of the skirt. See the bottom of the zipper?



And the side



It zips on the sides and there are the two buttons and flaps on the top. I thought about two zippers that met in the middle at the top or one long zipper around the whole thing - but I didn't have long enough zippers for that and I couldn't wait a single moment to get started on this! I'm taking it on a trip with me at the end of the week, so we'll see how it stands up to travel. I'm pretty impressed with myself, even if it doesn't stand up to traveling. =)

Rain Gardens

It's finally time for the long-awaited rain garden update. (As a reminder, here are the front yard and boulevard gardens, the last time I posted about them, a year ago!)

This is the back yard rain garden with purple irises, yellow tulips, a whitish columbine, some sort of daisy, some coneflowers, turtlehead (that's the really big one sort of off to the right), one sunflower, some mystery grass-like plants that may or may not by Siberian Irises, and a hollyhock. And a huge weed too, but it's got flowers so I'm keeping it.



This is the front yard rain garden which is so packed full of stuff you can't even see what's in there in this picture!



What's in there is: that mystery white flower, creeping thyme, spearmint, phlox, cranesbill, a bunch of asters, creeping charlie, some fancy grasses, wild geranium, a tulip (no flower), more stuff I can't identify, and some crazy big weeds that are about to flower (so I'm keeping them!).

And, finally, here is the front boulevard garden:





I'm afraid the pictures don't do it justice. In here we have lots of coneflower (different varieties too), two white bleeding hearts, violets, two coreopsis, two columbines, tons of that mystery grass-could-be-siberian-iris, two mystery plants with pale blue flowers (which I swiped from the community garden - they were in the pathway!), lots of phlox, ribbon grass, yarrow, some sort of lobelia, a giant purple hyssop, and some daisies. It's actually fairly well packed out. I think in a year or two you won't be able to see any ground. I'm very pleased with it. I'll try to take some pics from the street side, which is lined with bricks.


Speaking of mystery flowers, I don't think I posted this one last year. It's relatively tall, maybe 2 feet, and has these fuzzy white flowers.





I'm curious if it's a kind of astilbe, but I'm not sure yet. And some mysterious fuschia colored flower is blooming in the front rain garden. I'll have to post that one soon. So that's the update on the rain gardens - thanks for your patience!

Ground cover

Most of our back and side yard looks like this:



Just bare dirt. I wanted some ground cover on this, but definitely not grass.
That first photo was April 25. I had just sprinkled white and purple clover seed on the ground.

April 29:


April 30:


Aren't they cute?!


May 18th!


The clover has been doing well and I've seeded it in several other spots. It comes back every year and can be pretty vigorous. I'm excited for our yard to look more green and less brown. I'll post some pics of the other areas when something starts growing.

One step at a time

Last week I said I'd be updating you with day 2 of the root cellar work. Well, day 2 has yet to happen. Jeremy is only working on that when the intern is here so he can teach him the ropes. Intern has been out sick, so Jeremy has been working on other projects.

Like, for instance, the bathroom electrical. Here's the old spot which had a standard light switch and plugin.



Jeremy wanted to put in all the electrical and drywall and get the bathroom to a finished state before putting the floor down upstairs.


This also meant finally getting our bathroom fan wired! It's the second one over from the left.


I was hoping Jeremy intended to actually wire the lights so I could show you the ugly old light in the bathroom (the one in both pics) and then show you the better light. But he left the light there. And he didn't even install the new one he wired in the ceiling!


But at least now we can use the bathroom and not have fluffs of insulation raining down on us. I think that only took a year...
And of course this is only a temporary fix since we have a whole plan for remodeling the bathroom. But who knows when that will happen.

p.s. The light switch is up higher than the original to make room for our really cool old sink that will go in someday. It has a really high back-splash. So I guess we'll have to patch that hole...