Too Hot to Move!

Yesterday was a blistering 95 degrees. My comfort zone is between 45 and 75, with 75 being barely tolerable! We needed to go get Jeff some new clothes for his new job, so a trip to Waterloo Premium Outlets was the order of the day. We planned to drop the kids at my in-laws around 11:30, so I had some time in the morning to accomplish a few important tasks.

The first task involved taking pictures of my wild rose which has finally bloomed for the first time since we bought the house 6 years ago. Living in an urban area, I am so pleased to have a wild rose growing in my back yard. It’s the “wild spot” in my lawn. Each summer I am careful to not mow it under as I cut the lawn. A few years ago, my mom brought up her chainsaw and I cut down a tree right on the fence. We left the stump high, but it still tries to grow shoots every summer. In order to get a nice picture of the rose bush, I had to trim back the shoots and weed around the stump. Here is the end result…

Next I turned my attention to my “not wild” wild rose bushes. They are not wild in that they were intentionally planted, not by me, along the side of the house. They are wild in that I had no trellis or anything to control them. I cut them back to the ground each fall and each summer they attack anyone who tries to walk on the sidewalk to the side door of the house. I decided today, that I would take an unused trellis, bought for something that the bunnies stole, and use it to “control” my rose bushes. I will take some pictures of the roses with the trellis later, but here is what the roses look like up close.

Finally, the heat outside was unbearable (I was out for maybe 5 minutes) so I went inside and guess who was dancing around, waiting for me?

Poor Joe hates the heat! He lays around looking sad and pathetic in the middle of the day. When the sun goes down and I open the windows and put fans in, he revives and gets all excited like his usual self. This morning there was a great breeze as a storm front moved through. Joe went outside with us as the kids and I hauled some old logs and limbs to the front for the garbage men to take away. He found nice shady spots in the breeze and seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself. He was rather happy to see the neighbor’s dog, Rocky, who looks like Joe but with long legs (dachshund / beagle mix). We all came inside as the rain began. Joe abhors the rain!

Backyard Cleanup

After we gardened and beautified everything along the side of the backyard, the kids decided it would be cool to clean up the area behind the garage to make it a nice place to sit and play. We began the process a couple days ago and didn’t think we would ever finish. If you have never seen the area behind my garage, imagine this…

and this (plus 2 more cans full)…

here…

and here.

It looks far better, don’t you think? We had tons of weeds, lots of small trees, and wood. Some of the wood had been there since we bought the house, and some of it a friend gave to us. Jeff and his buddies used to get together at our house on Friday nights to grill. One of them would get meat and they would grill it, eat it, and then sit around and burn wood on a small outdoor fireplace until the wee small hours of the morning (very manly, lol). That hasn’t gone on for a couple of summers, so we had all this wood sitting out there rotting. I kept some of the nicer long pieces, figuring we would cut them up and we could sit outside and burn them on some nice evenings this summer.

Kyle and I removed all of the small trees, stumps and all. That was a chore! Most of our soil is not really soil…it’s clay. Digging in clay is almost as difficult as digging in bedrock, LOL! Fortunately, the one place we have some nice soil is behind the garage. I think we counted 7 stumps that came out over a 2 day period, and my back was relieved when that was over! We obviously have some more work to do, but this is such an improvement over what it was that I keep asking myself, “Whose yard is this?”
The girls really like the new area, especially since Grandma brought over the sand turtle. Here they are hanging out in the tree (no pun intended).

On another backyard improvement note, Kyle’s garden gnome can finally see the light of day. He is “stuck” under my lilac bush which until a few days ago was just surrounded by lawn. As I was mulching the garden I thought it would look really mice to mulch around the lilac as well. Mr. Gnome thinks it was a good idea too. This will also make mowing around the lilac easier. YEAH!

More Gardening Fun

I had another very productive day of gardening. Last night we got a new begonia to replace the one Kyle lopped off, as well as some petunias that needed to be planted today. This morning I had to get up early anyway, so I got started with trimming the shrubs in front of the house around 7:30. I have electric hedge trimmers, but I figured the neighbors might appreciate the hand clippers instead. I also get annoyed with how the shrubs look when I use the electric clippers. I forgot to take a picture of how nice they look, but they do look much better now that they are all the same height.
After trimming the hedges for about an hour, I got started on the side garden. Here is an overview picture of the whole thing. I know it isn’t terribly clear, but I thought it was neat anyway.

I took a couple of ‘closer ups’ so you can see the pretty flowers. The lavender plant in the back I got in the garden center of a home repair store for $5. It is a fairly large plant and has a wonderful, strong, lavender scent.

These are the last things I need to plant. My MIL brought them to me today. I will have to plant them tomorrow or the next day, as my poor, old back is so sore it hurts to think about gardening!

This is one of my favorite spots in the back yard. It is in between the fence, separating our yard from the neighbors, and our garage. It leads to an open area in the back underneath the canopy of a huge old Maple tree. the kids and Joe like to use this area as a path from the front to the back. It has become a sort of ‘secret’ pathway. I got the idea yesterday, that it would be really cool to mulch the path for them and then clean up the back area and make it into a patio type thing. Kyle and I raked all the debris from the area and then dug up a sizable tree stump from the middle of the path. Finally we put down landscape fabric followed by a thin layer of mulch. The kids think it is wonderful, and it was a cheap, easy way of making them happy…always a good thing!

Erin chose this little plant the other day. She brought it home, dug a hole and planted it all by herself.

This may seem like a silly picture, but if you had seen this walkway before, you would understand my pleasure at its current state! It was too embarrassing, really, to take a before picture. See how there is a little grass in the sidewalk crack on the left side of the photo? Well, this whole sidewalk was nearly swallowed by weeds and grass growing in the cracks. I also discovered another 6 inches of sidewalk on the right of the stoop. It was overgrown with grass and weeds. I think this is what made my back hurt so much. I sat on the ground for over an hour pulling up weeds.

Gardening Fun

After our excursion to the Goat Hotel, errr…um the garden shop, the kids and I did some yard work. Kyle and I worked on taming the wild Forsythia in the backyard while the girls worked on digging holes to plant the new flowers we got. Digging holes should be easy, but at my house nothing is every easy! The soil is primarily clay, then add to that tons of tree and shrub roots and large rocks and you have a digging nightmare. In about 2 hours Sarah managed to plant a small lavender plant, 2 very orange begonias (one which Kyle accidentally chopped off), a daisy looking thing, and something else whose name escapes me (see the picture – it’s the pale yellow stuff).
Here is an overview of most of the garden. I still have to plant the gerbera daisies and the asters. I also stopped on my way home from work today and bought some petunias and a second lavender plant for Sarah. Once everything is planted, I have some red mulch to put around it all.

Here’s the pretty yellow thing whose name escapes me. The low green and purple stuff (left of center in front), also can’t remember what it is, I planted 3 or 4 summers ago and it just keeps spreading. Good thing I like it a lot!

I scalped, actually de-limbed, my forsythia bush. I would like for it to look more like trees than a shrub. If we decided to drive one of the cars into the fenced part of the yard, this thing tried to attack the car, scraping the sides with its woody stalks. Now the greenery and limbs are up high so the cars can drive “under” the canopy. I like the way it looks for now, but it will fill back in if I let it! I still need to shape the top of it, but this requires a ladder and mine is super rickety. It’ll have to wait for a day when I am feeling super brave (or just plain stupid).

Close up of the asters and daisies. I love these two colors together. I decided that I would try to keep the garden a combination of oranges, yellows, and purples. Then I went and bought pink petunias! Go figure!!!

Pretty Flowers

Today I went to my in laws to water their plants. While there, I decided to take a few pictures of their flowers. Here again, I am bad with plant names, so I’ll just post the pictures. Their yard was professionally landscaped a couple years ago and my mother-in-law has been planting flowers since then. Her gardens are absolutely beautiful!

Jeff planted this Honeysuckle when he was quite young, and now it is huge. The girls cleaned out the area under it, and planted some flowers. They like to go under the Honeysuckle and play. The wind chime is one the girls picked out and it says “Welcome.”

This is a great little rose bush. I would like one for my house.

These little blue flowers are one of my favorite hidden treasures. They are “hidden” among larger plants in the garden.

I took this picture looking almost straight up in the air. In the middle, just to the left of the two highest points of trees, is a black bird. He kept yelling at me while I was walking around under “his” tree. It took a couple of minutes for me to even be able to find him up there.

Yard Work

I don’t often find time to do yard work, but the jungle was getting out of control and I decided I should tackle it before we go out of town for 10 days. So yesterday, I enlisted the help of the kids and we got quite a lot accomplished.

I mowed the lawn while Kyle ran the weed whacker along the fence. The girls pulled weeds from my horribly overgrown garden, and then we all pulled out some cinder blocks that some previous owner “planted” along the fence. I say planted because they were sunk about 2/3 of the way into the ground and then the cavities were filled with soil and trees and things were growing up out of the cavities. I thought they were ugly and they got in the way when mowed, so we removed them.
Here are a couple pictures of the jungle that the girls weeded for me. I had to help them a little as some of the weeds were quite tenacious. As I was pulling for all I was worth on these weeds, I imagined weeds disappearing from someone’s garden on the other side of the earth!

When all the weeding was finished, we discovered some plants that had been put there intentionally. I am terrible with plant names, so I’ll just show you the pictures…

A touch out of focus, but pretty none the less. When I planted it, this was one small plant, now it has taken over a huge part of the garden. I wish it would take over a bunch more, as it is very pretty.

The girls surprised me with this for Mother’s Day last year. I came home from work, and there it was planted in my garden. It is starting to climb up the trellis, but I didn’t realize it had flowered until we uncovered it from many weeds yesterday.

You can see a bit more of the pretty purple flowers and the trellis, as well as the lower thing next to it. It shoots up these stalk-like things and just generally looks nice.

Here is an overall view taken from a spot close to where I took the “jungle” picture. It looks so much better.

Here are a few pictures of the rest of the flowers around the house. I did not take pictures of the rest of the lawn work we did, as my back was killing me, and I got into something I was allergic to. I took a shower, then Benadryl and was then in no condition to do anything but sleep.

This is my Fushia plant that my mother-in-law bought me for Mother’s Day this year. I sure hope Jeff remembers to water it while the kids and I are away! My grandfather always has beautiful, overflowing hanging baskets with Fushia plants. I have always wanted one, but I do not have a green thumb and forget to water things. Since this one is visible from the driveway when I pull in, I never forget to water it, or have Sarah do it.

These rose bushes were here when we bought the house. They try to overtake the sidewalk, and Jeff complains every summer that they are attacking him when he tries to get into the car. So every fall I cut them back almost to the ground, thinking that maybe that will tame them a bit, but every summer they come back bigger and more full of roses.

Here is a “closer up” of one of the flowers. My camera is acting squirrelly since I dropped it a couple weeks ago. Now it only takes good pictures when it wants to, and often I find corrupted files when I go to upload my pictures. Very frustrating!

That Pesky Tree!

Have you ever seen a tree embed itself into a fence? Well, I have a few of those in my backyard. Apparently nobody who lived in our house prior to us felt that trees do not belong entwined in fences. The house was built in ’24, but I am guessing the fence is MUCH younger than that. Somehow several trees were planted, or planted themselves, along the property line and as they grew became entangled in the fence. One of these trees is quite the monstrosity. it is not a huge tree, but it is persistent. I cut all of the greenery off of it the summer after we bought the house, which would have been 2002. I cut it all off again in the summers of ’03 and ’04. Last summer I left the stupid thing to its own devises, and this year apparently the neighbor was tired of it and cut all the greens off and many of the branches that had grown fairly large in only 2 years time. I told him that I would work on getting as much of it out of the fence as I could, then I’d try to figure out how to “help” the speed of the rotting process.

The tree on the far left in this picture is the offending tree. The top of it had been cut off before we bought the house, but the darn thing kept growing! The very dead tree stump in the center of this picture is also entwined in the fence. The bottom of it is mostly rotted away, but the section in the picture is home to many ants and other creepy crawlies.

In this picture, all that greenery behind the puppy is from the nasty tree. This was taken in June of this year.

So off on a slight tangent, the other day it was kind of nice out, in that it was not raining. I went out to mow the lawn one last time before winter spreads its beautiful blanket over us. It was about 50 degrees, but I had on a sweatshirt and I was, after all, walking in circles, so I was plenty warm. Kyle was in back cleaning up papers and stuff that had blown into the yard with the autumn “breezes” we have been having. Well, Sarah decided that she too needed to help. She began sweeping the grass off the sidewalks, when Erin appeared, claiming that she too wanted to help. Truly, both girls just wanted an excuse to be outside… Erin had been given a job indoors which had been abandoned as soon as I went out. I sent her back inside to finish and sent Sarah in to get a jacket. Sarah was back out and sweeping in about a minute, and maybe two minutes later, Erin was standing on the sidewalk talking to Sarah, crying her eyes out. I shouted over the mower trying to find out what all the fuss was about and found out we had been locked out! It seems that Miss Erin did not want to get locked out, so she “unlocked” the door on her way through it. I guess it didn’t occur to her that I prefer not locking myself out whilw mowing the lawn so the door was already unlocked. Being only 7 she does not really know how to check whether the door is locked or not until she is on the wrong side of it to unlock it.
So, what does one do when locked out of the house for 2 1/2 hours with the temp falling fast???

Cut trees out of the fence, of course! Kyle and I used a hatchet and bow saw and cut much of the offending tree out of the fence. We also got rid of a large chunk of the very dead stump in the fence.

Kyle so ‘enjoys’ having HIS picutre taken, that he decided to take mine in some rather unattractive poses!

So this is what is left of the horrid thing. I think I’ll drill holes in it, fill it with fertilizer, wrap it in plastic and let it rot! Perhaps next summer it will rot away. Of course, I imagine that section of fence will need to be replaced since the tree has caused some of it to corrode away.