My growing green thumb

I love flowers and color. The last few year I've had 4 hanging pots on our porch, but this year I decided that I wasn't going to climb on a chair to water them daily. So instead I put one on their side of the map post in the front yard, and the other 2 are on Shepard hooks in the backyard.


Ammon has absolutely LOVED picking flowers for the pots and yard. He'd get so excited when I'd tell him we're going to get more flowers. He was in a purple kick this year-so we ended up with LOTS of purple flowers. I did convince him that we needed some pink ones for the planters by the front door.



One of the planters by the front door. The tree stumps that they are sitting on came from the kids 's Great Granmda Riddles yard when she had a tree cut down we took 3 stumps to our house. I love the way they look with the pots on them in the growing months, and with decorations on them during the non growing months.


I love these Lilly's on the side of the house by the chimney.

Also another "project" I had this year was to take out the landscaped area around the lamp post. It had so much area to take care of and it needed to be weeded so often that if I neglected it for even a week the weeds took over the plants. We added alot of mulch to it last year to help it look nice, and every time it rained, the mulch went onto the grass and eventually it started to kill the grass.

I had been working on moving the bricks to make the lawn extend to the sidewalk, but it was tiring and I was going at it so slowly. Then my parents came at the beginning on May. In just a few hours they had the bricks out, the bricks laid around the lamp post for the much smaller planter area, the plants out and transplanted and we were watering the grass seed. It was amazing how fast they were.
I watered the grass 3-5 times a day. I kept it moist and it WORKED!! You can't tell what is the new grass and what is the older grass. Even under the tree where it thinned out so badly last year is thick and hardy now. I sometime go out just to look at the grass because I am so shocked at how thick and nice it looks. So now when my parents come back in mid July our yard will be much fuller with beautiful green grass.


I was so excited to see blooms on my iris's this year. We got them as transplants from Trudy Russel about 5 or 6 years ago. I left them in a black trash bags for months, but they were still showing signs of life, so I planted them in the flowerbed at our house on Western Road. The 1st year they grew, but didn't bloom. (I was told that they take a full year after transplanting to bloom.) Then we moved and I didn't want to leave them, so I took 4 of the bulbs with us. When we moved in I planted them so they were new transplants and they grew some but didn't bloom. The 2nd year they didn't bloom either. This past fall they needed to be thinned, so I thinned them and transplanted a few more, and the weather got warm again and they grew some more. This spring we got our 1ST BLOOMS!! It only took 6 years to see the beautiful purple flowers that they produce.