Out of Doors

This is a short and un-expert video of our Family starting the hole for the trampoline at the beginning of spring.

The earliest beginnings of my garden this year. These were pumpkins. Sorry it's blurry.

Enjoying a bike-riding day, perfect for picture taking.

The front view of our house, Lilacs, tulips, daffy-down-dillies, Iris and strawberries have all come a long way!
More lilacs, some blue phlox, and bleeding hearts. See the new gutters?


This is from the north front corner, looking across the yard, past the front door.
The north side of our yard, where we planted some grapes, hoping that the heat caught by the neighbor's garage would be just what they needed to flourish.
These trees were planted just after Tag was born. Four here, at the north of our lot, and six in a row at the east side of the garden area. I cut them all off about fifteen inches above the ground. All but one peach put up with it admirably. I want short, wide, manageable trees, and lots of them with manageable yields of fruit.
Here's our completed trampoline installation. The hole extends about two and a half feet deep in the center, but is only one foot deep at the edges. The legs have been shortened to stand the top about 18 inches off the ground. It took about two weeks of infrequent digging, because of rain, to finish, but was completely worth it! We love not having to worry so much when the kids are playing on it, and feel it is so much safer.

Below, you can see the trees near the garden better.
Pears, peaches, apricots, plums, and apples. Also, raspberries. Which went crazy this year.

Before much was planted, just onions, spinach and lettuce there, and the raspberries coming back.
The arbor Ty made is simply gorgeous, even when completely bereft of greenery. Next to it on either side, he built planters for me to try the desirable type of morning glory this year. Next year, we'll try sweet peas. The benches, are perfect to stand on and wave hello to the neighbors and hold garden tools and harvested bounty really well. We don't spend a lot of time sitting on them though.

These are the peas that I started growing in early March, here on the south side of our garage, thinking they would be warmer there, in the cold months. They covered most of the wall and gave us pounds and pounds of peas in the pod that were delicious. They were done by July, so, before I thought of taking another picture of their bounteous glory, I pulled them off the trellis. The trellis is there, you can see it just against the dark earth at the bottom, and in the window reflection. It's uv-treated plastic mesh about 7 inches square, and is fastened about six feet high all along the wall with masonry screws and a wire woven thru it.

Tiny little corn peeking up here.
Iris. Love it!
I love pink lilacs!
Our first strawberries!
Great ground cover, but tricky to pick later without stepping into the bed.
We had a lot of visitors to the garden this year. A covey of quail frequent our yard. Here's one of them standing on just one leg. Below is a bird that nearly brained itself flying into one of the sun room's closed windows. Ally brought it in to recover, and the kids had fun holding and petting it for a half-hour.

Simply delighted by this little bird. You should have heard the squeals of laughter!

Thank you, Vanna! Smile, Brynne!
It was really fun for the kids, and they were glad to help it get better. We let it go that night also, and it was able to fly to the hedge next to our garden, just fine.

Things have started getting abundant in mid July. The horizontal slats you see through the arbor is a bench glider that is perfect to sit on once the shade hits it at about four pm.
We'd never seen a red praying mantis before.

There are the Morning Glories!
The peas are gone by this point, and these are spaghetti squash, cantaloupes and tomatoes.
I just love it!

The rest of these pictures are more recent. This is a long shot of our back fence and the future garden bed I'm trying to put in there. It will have flowers, and herbs and shrubs and maybe a new peach or nectarine tree. And I have some legally purchased Sego Lily seeds to grow there as well.

My whimsical wavy garden edge is not all I hoped it would be, but there's plenty of time to work with it. You can just see the raspberries far off in the distance.
Here are the grapes, which almost cover the side of the garage now. Also the trees near the sandbox did great this year. We got about three pounds of grapes from our vines this year, and hope for some tree fruit next year, maybe.

This is what the front garden looks like now: Autumn Glory Sedum in back, petunias, snapdragons and an orange daisy-ish flower that self-sows like crazy!