Category: garden.

Woo hoo!  Happy spring!

OK, technically the first official day of spring was yesterday so I’m a day late.  It snowed here yesterday though, so it didn’t feel particularly spring-like.

Here in Minnesota we won’t actually be able to start gardening for at least another 4 to 6 weeks.  On average we are not safe from potential frosts until May 15.

But the days are definitely getting longer and last Saturday was bright and sunny with a high in the upper 40’s.  Some of you from warmer climates might be shaking your head at that, but for us sunshine and 48 degrees in March feels pretty dang awesome.  Lots of snow was melting!

To celebrate the arrival of spring, I hauled out my Cricut machine and added words to some stuff.

It may be too early to plant in the garden, but it’s not too early to plant up some succulents for your windowsill.

Reclaiming Beautiful (the shop in Stillwater, MN where I sell on commission) is bringing back their famous succulent bar starting tomorrow.  Basically they have everything set up for potting up some succulents.  You choose a container, fill it with soil, choose some succulents to add and then add some further embellishments if desired.  If you are local, check out the full details here.

I’ll be bringing in some vintage-ware that can be used as containers.

I love planting in old enamelware.

Pretty vintage china is perfect for succulents too.

So, if you’re local you should swing by Reclaiming Beautiful, and if you aren’t local, head to your favorite nursery and find something green to pot up in a vintage container to tide you over until spring really does arrive!

I mentioned a while back that my neighbor across the street, nnK, won the Acorn Award this year.  The Acorn Award is our city’s award for landscaping that goes ‘above and beyond’ normal standards.  After nnK won the award, the garden club contacted her and asked if they could plan a time to tour her garden (I shared nnK’s pond garden here).  They also asked if they could tour my garden while they were in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately the date they had available for a visit was this past Monday which was definitely not the best time to visit my gardens.  I’ve mentioned in the past that I usually throw in the towel on gardening by mid-August.  The weeds begin to take over, I’ve usually got a fair amount of Asian beetle damage by now, and inevitably I have some (or in the case of this year, lots of) hail damage.  The Ostrich ferns start to die back in August and the prettiest perennials, such as the peonies and lilacs, are long past blooming.

But mid-August was what worked for the garden club schedule, so I made a little last ditch effort to spruce things up a bit for their visit.

The fact that the hydrangeas are blooming helped quite a bit.

And the annuals in my planters added a bit of color.

I planted New Guinea impatiens and fuchsias in my front window box this year and they are going gang busters.  I’ll plant them again next year.

I think the fairy garden was a big hit.

If you haven’t seen it before, my fairy garden is planted in an old concrete bird bath that is cracked so it won’t hold water anymore.  That makes it perfect for planting because it allows for drainage.

My bright green/yellow lamium has finally taken off after a very slow start this spring and luckily my concrete rabbit doesn’t eat much (you can see some of that hail damage on the hosta on the upper left side of the photo).

I love this stuff for adding a bright spot in a shady garden.

My statue, Cossetta, was a garage sale find.  I think some of the garden club members found her tiara amusing.

But hey, what girl doesn’t want to wear a tiara now and then?

Even though the Ostrich ferns in my fern garden were mostly brown, the Japanese painted ferns still look good.

As did the Maiden Hair ferns.

I feel like the summer is just slipping away from me again this year.  Fall is right around the corner, and this is probably the garden’s last hurrah so it was fun to share it with both the garden club and you guys.

My sister and I are off to Oronoco Gold Rush bright and early tomorrow morning.  Hopefully we’ll find some fun vintage goodies that I can share with you next week.  Fingers crossed!

A short while ago Danielle from Finding Silver Pennies wrote a blog post about making terrariums and it got me thinking about making one myself for my desk at the day job.

You have to get a nice close look to really properly admire a terrarium.  And since I have a desk job, well, I’m sitting right there for 8 hours a day.  Why not add something pretty to look at, right?

So last weekend my sister and I headed over to our local Bachman’s and picked up some supplies.

And I also pulled out some stuff I already had.  The glass jar was a garage sale find, and the mini Buddha and other items are from my fairy garden.

For anyone who is local and shops at Bachmans, they know that the purple striped plastic bag can only mean one thing, plants (or flowers) are inside!

In this case I have a tiny Cyclamen, a variegated flowering maple, a Selaginella and a Hemigraphis (you can barely see it, it’s that purple leaf poking out of the box in the foreground).

I followed Danielle’s instructions by washing my jar first, then adding a layer of pebbles, followed by a layer of dirt.  Then I added my plants and a little more dirt to fill in around them.  Finally I added my mini garden ornaments.

I might have overdone it a bit with the plants because my Buddha is barely peeking his head above them.

By the way, although I’ve had the Buddha and his little temple for a couple of years, I did notice that Bachman’s still carries them so if you are local you can still find them there.

My terrarium cost about $22 to make including the pebbles, potting soil, plants and the garage sale jar.  In other words, it was about the same price as a pretty bouquet of cut flowers, but it’s going to last a bit longer.

I say a ‘bit’ longer because the cyclamen won’t be blooming forever.  And there is a good chance that I will give up on the whole thing by spring and move the rest of the plants into my fairy garden.  But for now I’ll take this to work and enjoy having a tiny garden on my desk while I’m waiting patiently for spring to arrive.

I took a much needed vacation day from the day job today to rest up after my sale.  I told Mr. Q that my plan was to just do whatever I felt like.  And apparently what I felt like doing was strolling around the garden taking photos to share with you guys.

Fall is such a lovely time in the garden.  Even though things are starting to die back (we’ve had two nights of temps right around freezing this week), the fall colors are just so vibrant.  My Tiger Eye sumac is looking particularly colorful these days.

I went a little ‘old school’ this year on my window boxes.  I found large-ish potted mums at Cub Foods (a local grocery store chain) for $3.33 each.  I wanted to use some in my ‘hello fall’ tool boxes …

and they were so affordable that I went a little crazy and purchased a dozen of them.

So all of my planters got some mums for fall.

With the addition of a little ornamental kale, some cut hydrangea flowers …

and maybe a ‘hello fall’ plate, they look pretty fab for $3.33.

In some cases I left a few of my summer annuals behind because I couldn’t bear to pull them out just yet.

The front window box got its share of mums also.  I’m realizing now that the red and white combo almost looks a little more Christmas-y rather than fall-like.  Lots of the annuals in the front window box are still going strong despite the cold weather including the Jester’s Crown ferns, the variegated ivy and the euphorbia.

The spot where I now have the mums was filled with a gorgeous pink and white caladium for the summer, but caladium can’t handle even the slightest cold weather.  As soon as the temps went below about 50 they started drooping and I had to pull them out.

The baby tears that I planted in this little teacup are still doing well though, I may have to bring this in for the winter because it just looks so sweet.

I bought that little fairy mailbox at a cute little shop in the Linden Hills neighborhood.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing a few fall colors here today.  Usually the fall colors peak right about now here in the Twin Cities, but I feel like they aren’t quite there yet today.  Any day now though.

This weekend I’ll be working on a lovely sideboard and maybe a few other small projects, so be sure to check back next week.

To those of you in the U.S. and Canada, happy Labor Day!  To those of you in other countries, I’m curious, do you have a similar holiday?  Apparently the purpose of Labor Day is to celebrate the achievements of workers.  Well, count me in!  Not only do I have today off work at the day job, but I’ve taken the entire week off to work at home.  I’ve got that sale coming up and lots of projects to finish up before then!

We had a beautiful sunny morning yesterday and I was up early (a bonus to getting older) so I decided to take my camera on a late summer walkabout of my gardens.

This is the time of year when my gardens start to look pretty darn unruly.  I have given up on trying to keep things under control.  After all, it’s all going to die in another month or so.

That being said, everything has grown like gangbusters this year.  Especially that caladium in the middle of my window box.  I’ve never had caladium get quite that tall.

The metal molding that I used on the front of the window box gets a little rustier every year (to see how it looked two years ago, check out this post).

I’ve managed to escape getting any hail damage this year, plus we had plenty of rain so I believe I only had to get the sprinkler out one time this summer.

The fairy garden is lush and full this year as well.

And I’ve already mentioned that my hydrangeas have all become monsters this season.

Look at who I caught hiding out in the hydrangea by my photo cottage.

I must have some sort of colony of these tiny little green tree frogs in my gardens.  I mistakenly brought one in the house on some cut flowers earlier this summer.  He leaped from the flowers to my paper towel holder and completely freaked me out.  Luckily it was easy enough to catch him and take him back outside where he belonged.

This time of year I’m always torn between wishing summer would never end and being glad to be done with gardening chores.  How about you?  Looking forward to fall?  Or trying to eke out the last remaining drops of summer?