In the garden

When I started designing the garden for the front door, I had every intention of having all blue and white flowers.  Cool, calm, tranquil.

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Several years ago I bought two beautiful blue hydrangeas to add to the mix.  But those hydrangeas defied me and turned pink by the next year.  I should have expected it since there is so much limestone in our soil and that’s what turns them pink.  I tried adding garden sulpher which is supposed to turn them blue and probably accounts for the blooms being anywhere from pink to purple to blue.  Quite lovely.

So I finally gave up on the blue and white garden and have just thrown pink in there willy-nilly.

Hydrangeas are at the top of my list for flowering plants.  They always reward me with beautiful blooms–pink or blue or some variation.  And they make it through the coldest winter and hottest summer. They do like a lot of water which is on the negative side to me. 

From the two blue plants I bought initially, I now have eleven.  The other nine, I started with branches from the first two plants, coated the cut end with rooting compound and then stuck them in pots of miracle gro potting soil. 

I did buy one more hydrangea.  There weren’t any blooms on it so I asked about the color and the guy at the nursery said–it starts out green, turns to pink, and then ends up blue. 

I highly doubted that but bought it anyhow.

It’s pink. 

It’s not in that “blue and white” garden so it doesn’t matter.  And it is the most wonderful hydrangea ever.  The blooms are HUGE.  When I cut these for the house, one fills the whole vase. And it lasts for over a week without any care.

 Okay.  One more hydrangea. This one Michelle gave me.  It’s a shooting star.

I’ve attempted to root this one several times with no success.  I saw a video on the “Southern Living” website that says to just take a branch, put it across the top of a planter with potting soil and weigh it down with a rock.  In two months–a new hydrangea.  So I’m planning to try that method with this one.

I’ll let you know if it works!

After a crazy busy week we decided to just stay home this weekend.  And look how lovely the gardens are!

Pretty Pretty Pretty.

We have a plethora of squirrels.  And they are very demanding.

I gave up on my little vegetable garden this year.  Partly because it wasn’t getting enough sun.  And whatever did make it, these little rodents managed to destroy.

Last year they figured out how to get into our “squirrel-proof” bird feeders.

 

We put these really big PVC pipes up and sprayed painted them with gloss paint. This was at the suggestion of a neighbor.  The theory was that they couldn’t a toe hold because the paint was too shiny and the pole too wide.  (Doesn’t work against raccoons, though) This actually worked for several years.  But last year two super damn squirrels somehow climbed them and ruined the paint job in the process.  We finally foiled them by spraying WD-40 on the poles!  Terry read about this somewhere.  The squirrels also chew the twinkle lights off of the wires and the WD-40 takes care of that, too.  

And then there are the hummingbird feeders…

The WD-40 trick didn’t work with those.

But this year Terry fixed their little bushy-tailed butts.

It worked!