Forced Bulbs Blooming

I'm a little slow in posting this picture, but it's still worth putting up on this site, I think. These bloomed over the week coming up to Mother's Day weekend, and I was thrilled to see them because I've never tried forcing bulbs before.

Late last fall, when bulbs were on deep discount at Wal-Mart, I bought three packages of bulbs for this little experiment. Two were daffodils, and one was a large variety of hyacinth. The daffodils didn't bloom, but every one of the hyacinth did.

I planted them in shallow pots with soil, covering them only as much as they would be covered if planted in the soil outside. Then I watered them and enclosed the entire pot in a zippered plastic bag and put them in the bag of the refrigerator for several months. When the shoots are 1-2 inches in height, take the pot out of the fridge and put them in a sunny place. They'll continue to grow and eventually bloom.

What a treat to my winter-starved eyes earlier this month! And I still enjoy this photo, even though my spring tulips have come and gone. Now I wait for the irises and lilies to bloom...Thank you, Lord, for the spring!

He's a Happy Boy!

While I was in our yard taking photos of our fall flowers, Charlie was following me around, as usual. I stooped to shoot the black-eyed susans that you see in this picture, and guess who sat right next to them to be part of the photo?

Doesn't he look like he's having a good time? This is why we call little Charlie our Happy Boy! :-)

Easter Lilies in September

What a thrill to see Easter lilies blooming in my garden in the fall!

My dear mother-in-law has been giving me the Easter lily she buys in honor of her husband every year for the past two or three years. Each year I've enjoyed them while the blossoms lasted after Easter and then planted them into my garden, but I've never had them blossom again...until this summer and fall!

These are the second set of liles to blossom this year. The first came in August, and the second came right before we left from our vacation up north (a couple of weeks ago), and I was thrilled to return home and find that they were still blooming.

Another thing that was thrilling and amazing to me was that I didn't expect more than one lily plant to sprout from the ground where I planted just one plant. I knew that I might have more than one blossom per plant, but I didn't know that after planting the lily from the pot and watching it shrivel back a bit and look like it would be focusing on putting down roots this year, when the plants came up again (either the next year or, this year, it happened later the same season), I would have multiple plants from that one planting. What you see in this photo here is what I planted this year from one plant, and you might be able to pick out in this photo that there are three distinct plants coming up in this area.

I'm no botanist, so I don't know why this happened, or whether this means that these particular plants that bloomed this month will die over the winter since they didn't spend the summer this year just putting down roots. But I'm just going to enjoy what came up when it's here. It reminds of that verse in the Bible...

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. (Isaiah 40:8)

Raspberries from our garden

I haven't had the time to grow vegetables in a garden for at least the last four years. I picked that number because that's how long it's been since I took a job with a long commute...But that job is with a ministry, and I really love the work. So, the lack of fresh veggies from my own garden is a sacrifice for a very worthwhile cause.

So, this summer, instead of tending my own garden, I've taken to making regular trips to our local farmers market. But one thing that my farmers market hasn't had is, thankfully, the one edible (beyond herbs) that we can eat from our garden. We didn't have many, but we did have raspberries this year.

This photo shows about one half of our 2008 raspberry "harvest". The plants are only two years old, so hopefully we'll have more in years to come. The plants were a gift from my husband's cousin, who is married to a botanist, so everything she gives me from her garden grows really well in this area. We enjoyed raspberries on ice cream one time, and then one time we added them to a fruit salad. They were wonderful! I hope there will be more in 2009! :-)

The gate to our future Asian-stye garden

My husband has been working a lot in our backyard, as of late. Most impressively, he built this beautiful Asian-style garden gate. It serves as the opening in a new fence that he installed between the part of our backyard that our schnauzer, Charlie, considers his domain, and the part that, Lord willing, we will start to develop into a Japanese-style garden next year.

At this point, I'm just starting the research stage of trying to determine what to plant. We're looking at mainly perennials in this garden, so they have to be hardy to Zone 3. And because of all of the lovely tall trees in our yard and in the neighboring yards, they must also be shade tolerant.

On the sunnier side of this fence, we planted eight Miss Kim lilacs, which should only grow to between 4 and 6 feet. That will be enough to eventually cover the fence, and we probably plant lilacs or other bushes on the Asian side of the fence as well...Again, that's a project for another year.

We're doing this on our own time with our own labor, and we're working hard to keep it all within our limited budget. The wood chips that you see in the background of this photo were all free for the hauling during our city's annual clean-up day in June. We hauled seven trailer loads of wood chips to our yard and spent all morning and most of an afternoon one Saturday spreading them around. We'll move them around a bit more when we get ready to start planting in 2009.

The little lantern and dry pond that you see in this other photo was my husband's first effort toward our Asian-style backyard getaway. We live in a low-lying area and had to install a waterproofing system in our basement, which includes a pump that drains into the south side of our backyard. So, rather than have a swampy place to deal with, my Sweetie dug a little bone-shaped "pond" and lined it with river rock. Then he added the little stone lantern and the ferns that you see here. We named this little "pond" in honor of our dog, calling it "Little Bone Lake."