February Anemone

 My MIL gave me some anemone corms for my birthday last year. I soaked them in water to activate them and then planted them soon after, but nothing grew. And then, just a few days ago, I noticed this February flower had popped up in the garden, even beating out the daffodils whose closed buds are just starting to swell:

We are supposed to have below-freezing temperatures this week with a chance of snow, so I'm not sure if this beautiful flower is going to survive. It was nice to pretend for a few days that spring was on its way, even though it isn't. This flower has given me hope that the winter will end, though. And I'm also hopeful that some of these other anemone corms will wake up, too!

Unplanned Blustery Day

Today didn't go as I thought it would, largely due to the strong winds that we experienced today. Not long after the kids started their Zoom sessions, the power went out. They had enough battery life on their devices to keep their computers on, but we had to turn my phone into a hot spot so that they could get back online. We set it up in the hall, so they could both get reception from their different bedrooms. I needed to work too, so I huddled on the floor in the hall to try and grade midterm exams. It was a silly and uncomfortable way to perform an already tedious task.

I didn't get too much work done in the early afternoon, either, since I was helping Lucy with her schoolwork. I planned to get more work done while Lucy was on her last Zoom call of the day (with the Hazelwood "specialists": the P.E instructors, music instructor, and librarian). But not long after her call started, Sam came running inside to tell me that a portion of our maple tree had blown down in the wind.

I've really loved this maple tree over the past few years; it grew really quickly in the years after we bought our house and has become a nice source of shade. It looks like part of the trunk has rotted, though, so I'm not sure if we will be able to keep it. We are lucky that the tree didn't fall down a few more inches to the south, or it would have hit our cars in the driveway.

I'm sad that we have a big gash in our trunk and a big hole in the body of the tree boughs

The kids were really excited about cleaning up this project - this fallen tree is one of the most exciting things to happen during a pandemic, when you're staying at home all the time and all the days seem the same! They both wanted to help so I had to teach them a few tips about tool safety.

As we cleaned up the branches, I gathered a few of the leaves from the branches that had started to change color. I'm sad that most of the fallen leaves didn't get a chance to brilliantly ignite with autumn color one last time. And I'm sad that that portion of the tree won't have as much color anymore. Hopefully we can keep the tree - I'm not sure since it looks like there is some rot. But if we do get to keep it, I hope the tree boughs will fill in again so we can enjoy a rich palette of color in the years to come.

And even though this day didn't go as planned, a lot of good things happened. I'm glad that it wasn't raining when the tree fell down, and I'm grateful that the cars weren't damaged. We also had a really fun end to the day, where the kids made up this contest to make the weirdest face and the weirdest dance. We all participated in the contest, including me and J. It was nice to send the kids to bed on such a high note, after we all had a few belly-laugh-until-you-cry episodes.

Summer and Fall Garden

Hans Thoma, The Rhine near Säckingen, 1873

I got back from my trip to Germany about a week and a half ago, and I keep thinking of this painting that I saw in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The green color of the field reminded me exactly of the green that I noticed when I drove through the German countryside. It is a distictly different color green than what I see in the PNW - the German green is brighter and a lighter value. And it has been a little depressing to come back to Seattle since my trip: my lawn is completely burned out and my summer garden flowers are fading and shriveling away. The green color of the German countryside is nowhere to be seen.

I was able to buy some mums and asters this week to try and rejuvenate the color of the garden for the fall months, even if just a little. The Belgian mums colors are: Prima White, Conaco Yellow, Urano Orange, and Granata Red. And the asters are Henry III Purple and Henry I Blue.

This week also been looking at photos of my garden from earlier in the spring, to remind me of happier times when the plants were thriving. TO be honest, I didn't love the assortment of flowers in my garden this year: I had to plant a lot of marigolds and geraniums (two of the flowers that I like the least), simply because the rabbits would not eat them. I also planted a lot of snapdragons this year, too, but I like those flowers. I also planted a few foxglove as well.

I also tried out a few new flowers, and I was excited that the bunnies left them alone. I planted some lithodora and a Rolly's Favorite Catchfly. For my birthday, Ixoj gave me some Calibrachoa plants which did quite well (and the rabbits left them alone!). Ixoj also gave me Coreopsis Curry Up which stayed green the whole season, but did not produce any flowers. I'm hoping that it just needed time to stabilize and that there will be flowers next year.

Lithodora

Rolly's Favorite Catchfly

Coreopsis Curry Up (the small green bunch in the center)

Calibrate plant (at the end of the summer season)

We had a really wet spring and a very sunny summer, so the plants really thrived this year. The red Lucifer Crocosmia plant got huge and was larger than it has ever been. The daisy plant also got really large and the wisteria finally began to climb across the top of the trellis and down the other side. The hydrangea on the side of the house has gotten really large too.

Daisies in early July

Wisteria across the top of the trellis (mid-July)

Hydrangea in early August

The other major change to our garden is that we had to put up a little green wire fence (about a foot tall) to keep our puppy Violet out of the flower beds. Violet can stick her head between the wires if she is determined, but for the most part she keeps out of the flowers.

UPDATE (09/16): Well, I don't think we will be planting asters in our yard again. Either a rabbit or a deer completely eradicated the Henry I Purple aster plant. All of the blossoms and leaves were chewed off today, down to the stems. Too bad!

Spring Planting

My family - particularly J - indulged me over the weekend and let me focus on some major gardening projects in the yard. J and I woke up early and started to work while Lucy was asleep. After she woke up, we even figured out a system to keep her happy in the garden for another hour or so while I continued to clear out one of the garden beds. J worked mostly in the front of the yard and driveway, pulling out weeds that started to sprout among the gravel.

This is how you can contain an imp while you work in the garden before breakfast. We even set up a little Baby Einstein show for her to watch for a while - she loves the scenes with the animal puppets.

At the end of the day, we made some major improvements in clearing out the bed and planting flowers. There still are some weeds in the flower bed, but we pulled out all of the grass and were able to work around a lot of the California Poppy plants. As for the flowers we planted, I'll think of them as my Mother's Day gift from J, since he was so patient and helpful with the kids while we worked over the weekend.

Here are the annuals that we planted in the bed this year:

•  Cumbanita (Red) Geraniums
• Trailing red verbena
• Mounding viola (violets)
• African Marigold (Sam's pick - I don't care much for marigolds but I do like the bright color)
• Some orange zinnias
• French Marigold (Dwarf) - this was in the verbena six-pack. I'm not sure if the plant tag was added into the pack by mistake, but we planted it and will see what opens when it blooms.
• Purple African Daisy (J's pick).

I think that this May Night Salvia is going to be me favorite addition to this garden bed. I bought three of these, and they are a mounding perennial. I love the color and texture that they add to the space, and I think I will get a couple more this week. I hope they do well in this space.

We planted this Ruby's Tuesday Dianthus to replace the Bowles Mauve Wallflower that we planted three years ago.The wallflower plant grew to be immense, but I think it might have grown too large for its own good. A huge root system began to pop out of the ground and the whole plant died over the winter. Hopefully this dianthus will thrive in the same location. It is supposed to bloom throughout the spring, summer, and fall.

We still have a lot of work to do. My sister sent a landscaper to look at our yard last week (as a present to me), and I hope to have his team help out with the weeding around the back. We want to pull out the weeds and put down some landscape fabric to prevent any future growth.

A Few New Flowers

Well, once again, I'm writing an early morning post. Today I woke up at 4:45 am, hungry and wide awake. There was one bird tweeting outside, but I don't think I can blame it for waking me up. It's just getting more difficult to sleep these days, and the slightest discomforts seem to wake me up. I remember a few months ago my cousin-in-law Jess mentioned how she was glad when her pregnancies ended, because then she could finally get some sleep. I couldn't understand what she meant, having only remembered losing sleep after Sam was born, but now I can see her point of view.

Just when I posted about not having the stamina to garden, I did find some time to purchase and plant a few new flowers. I was able to weed one garden bed, and J did a great job of weeding the other one. We've laid down more wood chips, so I think we'll keep the weeds at bay for the next few weeks.

I planted a peach-colored foxglove and a blueish-violet delphinium in the back section of the northwest garden. Both of these are supposed to keep blooming from late spring until mid-summer. I'm especially excited about the delphinium; its colors really pop and look great from a distance. I also had a replace one of our azaleas that died - I put a euryops (bush daisy) perennial, which has been trained to grow like a little tree. I hope this change in height adds some visually-interesting height variation to the garden. We haven't enjoyed too many of the yellow blooms yet, but I'm hopeful.

J got this Tiny Skyline Asiatic Lily at the store, when I sent him on a quest to find "something colorful" for the corner of the northwest garden. I think that the orange color is a nice contrast with the blue of the nearby delphinium. This should reach somewhere between a foot tall and a foot wide. We hope that it gets enough sun throughout the day.

 I bought this brightly-colored Kalanchoe plant on a whim, because it was so striking at the nursery. I didn't realize that it is an annual until I got home, so we will only get to enjoy it this year. But perhaps I'll buy more in the future. This is supposed to get to a height of 14-16".

We also finally decided on a hanging plant! I don't know why, but choosing a hanging plant for the porch is always more difficult for me than it should be. I always visit several stores and mull over all of my options for several weeks before making a decision. I feel like hanging plants are such a big commitment, since you'll be looking at the flowers on your porch for a whole season. And I also don't like petunias that much, and hanging plants always seem to have petunias. I don't mind the miniature ones ("Apricot Red Eye") in this pot, though. This pot also has Bright Cascade geraniums (which are more interesting to me than regular geraniums), Blue Velvet verbena, and Colossal Blue bacopa (which looks more like a lavender).

May Flowers in my Garden

I know that my garden is going to suffer a bit this summer. I don't have the stamina and agility to wrestle with the weeds in my garden, especially the ones on the south side of the house (where I planted wildflower seeds a few years ago). I'm trying to at least maintain control of the two beds in the front of the house, since they are the most visible. Perhaps I'll get to attack the weeds in the wildflower bed in the summer, after the baby comes. But if not, I'm going to be content with enjoying the flowers that I have already planted. If there was ever a year to be lazy about gardening, it would be this year!

The Rubens climatis has been absolutely gorgeous this year. The wisteria and Avalanche climatis are doing alright, but I'm a little concerned that the Avalanche climatis hasn't grown or shown any signs of budding. We'll see if anything changes in the next few weeks.

I've really been enjoying the flowers that are in the bed right next to our fence. It's fun to look at them when I go in and out of the house. The peonies just started to open a few days ago. And, I'm happy that the poofy purple alliums have opened up this year. (It only took them two years!)

If you look closely in the back of this image, you can see that the orange California poppies are starting to open in the wildflower bed. The yellow Lady Stratheden Grecian Rose is also doing well.

From Snow Angels to Daffodils to Worms

Today was uncharacteristically warm, and Sam and I worked in the garden for an hour after Sam got home from school. It was the first time that I have made a sincere effort in the garden since the cold season started. It felt so nice to be out in the sun, pulling up weeds, turning dirt, and feeling productive overall. It's amazing how useful and happy I feel if I am able to work outside. I'm so glad that the cold season is beginning to end. I also was happy to be in the garden this afternoon, too, because the first daffodils began to open just today! They are blooming really early this year!

This month of February has been an unusual one, partially because we have experienced a range of weather. Earlier in the month we had a snowy weekend (Sam made snow angels in the yard before the snow melted a few hours later). We have also had some unusually warm and sunny days that pop up between spells of dramatically rainy weather. Additionally, this month has been unusual because we've kept busy with a lot of things that depart from our normal routine: J went on a trip to Amsterdam for work (I wish I could have been there with him!), we experienced multiple bouts of colds and sick days for J and Sam, we all went to the ultrasound appointment to learn the gender of the new baby, I helped oversee a time-consuming art project for Sam's school auction, and I also had some extra evening choir rehearsals. We are settling back into our normal schedule, though, which I can tell makes all of us happy. The three of us are creatures of habit; we thrive under our little routine.

And now we can start up our new routine of working in the garden, which makes me glad. Sam and I made a deal that he could earn two dollars if he worked with me in the garden for a whole hour (sorry we haven't raised the minimum hourly wage at our house, President Obama!). The deal also included that Sam could not whine or complain during the whole hour. If that happened, he could earn enough money so that he could buy the next level in his Lego Star Wars game on the iPad. And, amazingly, it worked! Sam has never been so cheerful doing yard work. He was a good "helpy helper" (as we say in our family) and we had some cute conversations while we worked away. Here are my two favorite things that Sam said today:

• "A worm has ten hearts. You have to shoot a worm ten times before it dies."
• "I know just about everything, except what the dinosaurs really looked like."

Sam did learn in kindergarten that earthworms have ten hearts, which I think is a logical way to explain to young children about five pairs of aortic valves. I also know that Sam's mindset about "shoot[ing] a worm ten times" is influenced by the Lego Star Wars game, where the life capacity of characters is indicated by a string of hearts on the screen. With ten hearts, a worm would be a more difficult character to defeat in that game!

And now, on to warmer weather! Goodbye, February. I'm glad to see you go. I'm glad to cross off one more month for this pregnancy, too. I think that this pregnancy (and time in general) will go by more quickly for me when the sun is around.

Deluge of House and Garden Projects

I have been swimming in a deluge of house projects over the past few weeks. This sudden push to complete house projects largely was due to two things: 1) the kinda-sorta finding of chairs to complete our dining set (see below) and 2) more free time since Sam started kindergarten. I wanted to get all of these projects done before school started, too.

We haven't bought any furniture for our house for over a year, even though we would have liked a few things. J said that he didn't want to get anything else for the house until we solved the dining room chair issue. So, we have been saving money for other furniture projects while I hunted for chairs online, insisting that we could find readymade chairs at a reasonable price somewhere (so we wouldn't have to pay through-the-nose to get the last chairs custom made). And, after searching for a year, I miraculously found a fourth chair at a consignment store in New York state that was willing to ship the chair to me. That completed our set (with two local chairs, one received through a store in North Carolina, and the fourth from New York state). We wanted to get two more chairs for the ends of the table, and I found some similar chairs (made by Blosser) on Craiglist in North Carolina. I had the chairs shipped, only to realize that I had bought pub-style chairs instead of regular chairs. Argh! So, the saga still continues a bit, but things are finished enough for J to feel okay about working on other furniture and house projects. We may have the legs of these high chairs cut, to help accommodate someone sitting at our table. But if you look at the set of chairs at the table, the set looks pretty good:

The Blosser chairs will need to be refinished with a darker color, too. You can see the difference between the chairs when they are side by side:

The other really big project was spreading gravel on our driveway. (I wrote a little bit about the early stages of this project HERE.) We got a little too much gravel, but luckily our next door neighbor was able to use most of the extra gravel. We also were able to spread some of the gravel on our walkway, which was pretty much nonexistent before. I'm so thrilled too walk out of the house and see gravel instead of dirt and weeds.

BEFORE

You can see where I had started to pull out grass and weeds in the foreground of the image, along the fence

AFTER 

IN PROGRESS

You can see how much grass we had to pull out, based on the unfinished portion in the background

I've also had the chance to paint, find furniture, find lamps, and work in the garden lately. Here's a smattering of images:

I painted the interior of our front entryway closet. This was the last area of unpainted drywall in our entire house. No more major painting projects!

We found a small bathroom cabinet for downstairs. J had to saw off the towel rod underneath, so that it would fit. I painted it a cream color to match the beadboard.

A curtain for the upstairs hallway! It's nice to have a little color there and more privacy.

His-and-hers lamps for the sides of our bed. When we moved in, some faux-antique white lamps were installed in the walls. My lamp didn't work, so we had it removed and there was a gaping hole on my side of the bed for about a yaer. I searched diligently for new lamps for a long time. J finally told me that I didn't need to be passionate about every single lamp and piece of furniture that we buy, so I settled on these practical ones.

We also rearranged some furniture and brought this chair upstairs to create a little reading area in our room. I got a little Ikea table and small Ikea lamp. I'm not passionate about them either, but they fill the space just fine.

I do really like this hall tree that we put in our entryway. The storage bench holds all of our boots and unseemly dirty shoes.  It's also nice to have a place to hang coats when guests come over.

 This lamp helps to really make our entryway seem more complete, I think. I really love this lamp. It has some nice purple and raspberry colors that go well with both the interior walls and the exterior color of our front door. I'm glad that I'm passionate about the first and last thing that I see when I go in and out of the house.

We created a little reading area in the downstairs living room with this accent chair and ottoman.

I've also been working in the garden. The flowers on the side of the house are coming along nicely. I also pulled out all of the old California Poppies, and put a few Black Eyed Susans in the gaps that were created. These Black Eyed Susans are perennials, so I hope to enjoy them each year.

I feel like the house has really come together over the past few months (although there are more projects I could name - don't look too closely at that shed in the background of the last two pictures!). Now I feel like I can move on into the fall season and upcoming school year, since I have been able to make visible improvements in the house during my summer break. I really love this house and enjoy making it a beautiful space that fits J's distinct taste and my distinct taste. It's really fulfilling and rewarding for me to work toward something that I hope to enjoy for many years to come.