Not All That It Could Be

The Idaho Falls Farmer's Market started last Saturday and the weather was so bad that the first day is not even worth dedicating an entire post to. To prepare for this horrifically cold and miserable day we spent nine sleepless nights in a row planting in the greenhouse, peeing outside and eating dirt. All to save time. Okay, so that is not true, but we did work really hard to get everything planted so that we could A) go guilt-free to Vegas and B) have all of our flowers looking mature and standing at full attention well before the first day. We accomplished both A and B.

I am now going to relay the story of the horrible day but, to help us all out and put us in the right frame of mind I will be intermingling the dreadful story with pictures of pretty things that are growing.

The day that we had so rigorously prepared for was not, to the disappointment of the Army. "All that it could be". In fact, it wasn't really anything that it could be. The weather was negative one million degrees with a record breaking one thousand mile an hour wind.

This is where breaking through one million year old tree branches came in handy because I was strong enough to withstand the conditions. Well, only for about two hours. I tried to get out of it an hour and a half into my post by calling my mom and telling her that the flowers just weren't making it.

Instead of telling me how proud she was of me for enduring said horrible conditions for what really did seem like an eternity and offering to bring me some hot chocolate, she told me to take the ones that did not look good down and put them in the corner.

I was like "nobody puts Baby in a corner, nobody". No wait, I wasn't like that at all.

I did as I was told and continued to stand in the almost unbearable conditions. I finally convinced her a half hour later , after we had made no sales and probably pissed people off with our " buy blooming flowers in the freezing cold" mentality.

The weather for this coming Saturday looks promising. Cross your fingers and come buy a strawberry ball. If you are lucky Suni will save you some ripe strawberries.

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.