Weekend Wrapup

I had a very productive weekend this time. The house wasn’t so dirty after having been cleaned top-to-bottom last weekend, so I didn’t mess with any of that, except for laundry. That left more time for photography, sewing and yard work. I intended to give the quiltmobile its first bath yesterday, but the sky couldn’t [...]

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Identify this plant

Does anyone know what this plant is called? Theses picture were taken at The Tides Inn in Irvington, Virginia but I saw another one at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden and it didn’t have an ID tag.

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Week in Review-part 3

I don’t know what it is about this spring that is attracting destructive wildlife to my garden.

This is a hosta with bite marks in it. We have been planting all our hostas in “vole cages” on the advice of a nurseryman, but this year for the first time the creatures are attacking the plants from [...]

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Unusual garden art

I certainly can understand a bit of whimsy in the garden. I have some myself:

But in the front yard? These shots were taken in neighborhoods within 2 or 3 miles of us.

I figure this gnome is probably 4 feet tall. I wish I could have stood next to it to give you a sense of [...]

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Garden update

A couple of updates on the garden patients:
Oak leaf hydrangea Before:

Now:

“Kaspar” hydrangea Before:

Now:

And some random garden shots:

This hosta is growing rather weird this season. It’s sort of a variegated variety but look how the new growth is coming out of the center in a solid color. There’s another one growing right next to it and [...]

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100th post!

I probably should have planned better, should have had a really great post to celebrate #100. But it crept up on me and I only just noticed that I’d posted #99. (Well, at least I didn’t miss it.)

So I don’t have anything great planned but I’m going to tell you about our “staycation” last week. It was John’s birthday week and the weather couldn’t have been better. We’re saving ourselves for a trip to California this summer, so we took last week off to get some household projects done.

The week started out with our church choir’s performance of John Rutter’s “Mass of the Children” on Sunday the 17th. It is an absolutely beautiful choral work, as most, if not all, Rutter pieces are. We’d been working on it since Christmas I think, but it was well worth it. It features adult and children’s choirs, soloists, organ and chamber orchestra. The children were stationed in the balcony, their voices were to be like angels, and angelic and ethereal it was.

John had some yard work planned, including taking out a couple of small trees growing where they shouldn’t have been, plus cleaning up some tree limbs in another bed. I planted 9 daylilies I got from our friend Anne:

Half of them already have flower buds!

My pride and joy, my Ballerina roses, were in full bloom last week:

We performed a long-overdue procedure on our kitchen floor and it was so successful I think I’ll be able to live with the awful thing for a while longer (good thing, since we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future.)

John got a new GPS from the kids and I for his birthday and he happily played with his new toy for the rest of the week. We ran around town so that he could put it through its paces. Only one thing about it that he’s not really happy with is the bluetooth feature, his iPhone doesn’t work well with it. If there is a new iPhone on the horizon, perhaps it will work better.

We took one day trip to the National Zoo in Washington DC . I’ll go into more detail about it in another post.

And we ate and ate and ate. John signed up for a bunch of local restaurants’ birthday clubs so we had coupons to use up. We went to our new Mimi’s Cafe twice, once to Lone Star, Coldstone. We went to Chili’s for fajitas on the birthday. Wow do they have great chips. We also went to Cheeburger Cheeburger in celebration of a friend’s birthday. We still have Red Robin and Firebird’s coupons left, but I expect they’ll expire before we can get there. So much for my May weigh-in this coming weekend.

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Cursed!

A couple of seasons ago, a friend gave me a cutting she’d rooted from an oak-leaf hydrangea. I nurtured it over the winter in its pot and in the spring, planted it in a bed in our front yard just across from the front door. I was so proud of it. Here is how it [...]

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Spring has sprung in Henrico

Even after 13 years living in Virginia, I am still in awe of the awakening garden in the spring. There’s a lot to be said of Southern California weather, but I never appreciated the changes between seasons because they are so subtle. 
I usually get spring fever in February and March when the daffodils start coming [...]

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