Dreariness

Two cheers for another blog. It has taken me three or four weekends in between more snow, Arizona, school, cooking and parenting to get my front yard cleaned up. You may be wondering why I have to clean up my yard in the spring when it should have been done in the fall. Let me remind you that I was shaped like a pumpkin and barely breathing through a straw poking out of all of the homework I was buried underneath, thus, the dead leaves were the last thing on my mind.

Here is a picture of my wheelbarrow that I filled last weekend and did not dump until yesterday. Imagine about 6 bags of leaves and eight wheelbarrow trips to the alley and you can guess what my front yard looked like a month ago.

Oh. and here are the leaves that are still in the backyard because no one sees them but our dogs and the occasional person driving by down the alley. The backyard is next on the clean-up agenda. Perhaps it will just take care of itself.

My garden is in the far back and it was also another casualty of the pumpkin mentality referred to above. My corn, tomatoes and peppers are still there.

But, my strawberries are getting nice and green.

Besides working really hard at cleaning up all of the debris from the last gardening season, I have been keeping alive some perennial bushes that I bought at Home Depot and some Phlox that I bought at Town and Country Gardens. This may not seem like much of a feat for those who are not 'growingly challenged', but for me it was quite a big deal. I decided that I better plant them before I my luck ran out. I also planted some bulbs that I cannot remember the name of.

Dwarf Burning Bush

phlox

Here is a little tour of my front yard from a distance and when you are looking at it I want you to think of one word: potential.

The row along my driveway is filled with white daisy and some other orange 'daisy looking thingy's' that I do not know the real name for. I am also going to plant some white allysum along the driveway so that I have some low growth. Behind the daisy's and the daisy thingy's are some red hot pokers that I planted last year and may have to move depending on how they look last year.

I planted several flats of perennials from seed last year and this being their second year of growth I expect nothing short of awesomeness.

Sweet Williams

Forget-Me-Not

Thyme

Painted Daisy

Lupine

Red Hot Poker

Because of the perennials incessant need to sleep for one year before it does anything useful, I decided that this year I needed instant gratification. Therefore, I have started from seed an amalgamation of different annuals and some perennials just to keep filling up the empty space.

Here are some of the annuals for the front yard. Sorry about all of the sad pictures in this blog, but, I think it is useful for you to know where I am starting.