Wildflower Wandering

This afternoon I had the opportunity to go out to Mt. Pisgah Arboretum, just outside of Eugene, to wander around with my camera.  It was gorgeous!  I've never visited when there was so much in bloom.

Hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed being there.  It was very peaceful and although there were other people there, I only encountered 6 while I was on the trails. I saw plenty of butterflies and birds but they seemed pretty camera shy so I got no photos of them.

The camas lilies were  so pretty and there were so many!  The meadow was filled with them.

Trillium. I just saw one clump of them so I don't know if it's early or late in the season for them or if I needed to go further up the hill to find more.

The Willamette River. 

I just love this old building.  

What's up Buttercup?

An opportunistic flower growing a couple feet off the ground in this tree trunk.

 

Go if you ever get the chance.

Thanks for visiting.  Feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to know you stopped by.

The view from my living room window

I really enjoy the view into the backyard from the living room window, part of which can even be seen all the way from the front door.  I took the photo from indoors while standing at the back window.  The colors are fun and cheerful and there is so much growth going on out there! 

As I look around I can see so many things that I have reclaimed and re-purposed.  Boy, I used to hate it when my parents wanted to go to garage sales or antique (junk) stores.  I just didn't get it when I was younger.  Now I enjoy it, to a point.  And I enjoy finding a new way to put something to use.  And I especially like NOT spending a bundle of money on the projects.

The 2nd, enlarged photo is numbered to show the various items I have reclaimed.

1. arbor - offered to me by a neighbor who was having a new one built
2. old window -  from Craigslist (CL) glass removed and replaced with chicken wire, now used as a door
3. pickets - from CL - fence pulled apart, pickets cut down and then reassembled, there are 2 sections of this picket fence
4. window - given to me by Dad when he learned I was looking for an old window. Some glass painted over with chalkboard paint, others replaced with corrugated plastic purchased at BRING recycling, 2x2 frame added to make it the sized I needed
5. retired fence - this is the fence that started it all. I saw it lying along the road and asked the owner for it so I could build a chicken coop.
6. window trim - from a neighbor's remodel, I saw the dumpster out front and asked if I could look for anything I might be able to use. I cut it up and made a window so I could see my chickens when they are in the back part of their compound.
7. fence - asked a neighbor if I could have some panels of a fence they were replacing, brought home 4, did a little repair and installed 2 panels to close off this side of the compound
8. wheelbarrow - this came with the house when we bought it 23 years ago. It got more and more rusty and the handles fell off. Eventually I dismantled it from the frame and moved it to the back border and filled it with bulbs. 
9. window - picked this up at a recycle/resale center up in Portland, someday will probably build a window box for it
10. chairs - St. Vinnie's, thought I would redo them for indoors but realized they were a lot rougher than I thought (love is blind, they say) so I sprayed them and put them around the table outdoors.  The paint isn't holding up very well but I suppose it adds to their charm.
11. GARDEN sign (shown at the top left of the previous photo) cropped out of this photo - when yet another neighbor did a bunch of demolition on a house he bought I asked if I could go through his discards.  I got so many treasures from his place!  This old piece of wood was one of them, I later distressed it and made the sign out of it.  The more I took from his dump trailer the less he had to haul off.  We both won. 

(If you click on the picture you will be able to see an enlarged version.)

Perhaps later I will photograph more of my reclaimed and re-purposed items around the garden.

I sure met a lot of neighbors while working on my projects. I even made some good friends in the process.  I lost all fear of asking people if I could have what they were throwing out. What's the worst that could happen?  They could say "no".  Oh, I suppose I could worry that they might talk about their eccentric neighbor (me) to the other neighbors but I guess I wanted their junk bad enough to not worry if they wanted to discuss me with someone else. 

Thanks for visiting.  Feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to know you stopped by.

Garden bloom tour April 2015

Let the garden tour begin in the  backyard with this potted candy tuft which I had to move up onto a stand to keep the chickens from digging out all the soil.

The flowering crab apples put on quite a show this year.  

This is a new bleeding heart plant I picked up at the Good Earth home show.  I need to move it because it turns out there is a hosta planted in almost the exact same spot.

 

Wood hyacinths, love the color.

There are half a dozen or so of these dark tulips in the raised bed.

The magenta tulips have really had some wow factor.  I like their pointed petals and bright color. I have them in several places.

So glad the tulips bloomed in the windowbox on the back fence.  It is gorgeous when you see the flowering crab apple and the tulips together.

Moving out to the front yard now.

New azalea I picked up at Costco.  It's a nice bright color in the border between the driveway and the grass where I recently pulled out all the knickknick.  (Update:  This azalea had to move to the backyard in 2016 because it couldn't handle the heat and dry soil out front.  It's near the chicken compound now.) 

Carmine Cosmos. Hoping it does well and reseeds so I have more next year.

The dianthus survived winter in their posts up against the house.  I gave them a nice haircut and they have started to bloom real nicely.

 Forget-me-not, what a lovely color.

Grape hyacinths, love 'em and hate 'em.  They come up all over the place.  I constantly remove them, but I do love their color.

A heuchera in a pot on the porch.

So excited that the lilac has FINALLY bloomed.  I started this one in a pot several years ago and was giving up on it.  The mother plant died after last February's ice storm.  It was a lovely surprise for this one to have 6 blooms this spring.

This rhody came with the house, I think this year it is blooming the best it has in 23 years.

I do have a thing for tulips!

I am so looking forward to the peony blooms and all the bearded iris too.

And I hope to keep posting photos of my garden as it grows so I have a diary to look back on.

Thanks for looking!  Though I am not a "real" garden blogger I will link this up with Carol from May Dreams Gardens for the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day.

A Tour of the Back Yard

 Let me take you on a virtual tour of the back yard.  We'll stand on the patio and first look to our left (east) and finish up with the view to the right (west). For the last several years there was a big blue eyesore pool sitting on the gravel 'pad', boy am I glad to not have it there!  Though I admit to being a little sad that we won't have a pool to play in this year.  After taking down the pool I made a fire-pit with some urbanite claimed from my friend, Craig aka Craigslist.  We became quite close last year as I gathered up supplies for various projects.   Beyond the fire-pit is what was supposed to be my raised vegetable bed. I say "supposed to be" because it just has never worked out very well for me.  For one thing it just hasn't gotten enough sun there and for another I am one of the few gardeners who cannot even grow zucchini, just ask my friend Katie. Sure, I'd like to bring fresh veggies in from the garden for a summer meal but it just hasn't worked that way for me.  So this past fall I put quite a few tulip bulbs in with the herbs, rhubarb and garlic that are currently in the bed.  Looks like the rhubarb is happy there.

The passionflower vine, of which we can only see half at the back left, is really starting to put on some growth.  I'm hoping for blooms this year.  And I was so pleased to see the clematis is back and growing quickly.  I've had bad luck with them in the past. 

We had the pine tree trimmed up quite a bit to relieve it of dead branches and needles in the hopes that it will let in more sunshine and just have a better appearance.  It used to screen out the neighbor's yard but as the lower branches died it became less and less of a screen.  I was all set to have it removed until the weekend a hawk attacked one of my chickens while they were out free-ranging and I realized that removing the tree would open up their compound quite a bit and not provide cover for them.

The chicken wire is there to protect the young plants as they emerge, I hope to be able to remove it sometime this summer and hope that they won't destroy the plants when I do.  Right now there are hostas, astilbe, iris and hardy a hardy fuchsia all coming up in this area.

   

 

The "compound" as I call it is pretty much thanks to Craigslist and neighbors.  I got real good at asking people for their discards, thought of even taking the nickname Dumpster Diva.  It all started with a pile of fence boards I saw while out on a walk one evening.  They were the beginning of the first chicken house, the one with the red door.  That was in 2013. The second house, fence and arbor were added in 2014 and continue to evolve as need arises.  The first house sat back there alone and the girls spent most of their time free-ranging throughout the yard. Then in 2014 I realized that they really did create quite a bit of mess and I didn't want to be constantly cleaning up after so I put up a temporary fence.  About that same time I added 3 more chicks to the bunch thus the need to build a second house.  And so on.....

There is a pink honeysuckle growing in a pot that I hope will one day grow up and over the arbor. But first I must finish securing the arbor. 

Even with clipped wings the girls occasionally fly out of the compound so I have put up the netting and chicken wire to keep them in.  They quickly figured out that they can fly to the top of the door and get out and they do it at least once a week.  Someday I will tackle that problem too.  Like I said it is an ever changing project as the needs arise.  

I love all the pink flowers (tulips) blooming throughout the yard and I definitely want to plant MORE this fall so I can enjoy them next spring.   Not sure what caused that crater in the back of the lawn but it's been there for a few years.  I filled it in with some compost and hope to get some grass growing there again.

I'm starting some lilies in the pots in the above photo.  That is where my raspberry patch used to be.  Quite a few years ago I started out with 19 canes donated by Dad.  We planted them along the dog kennel fence.  The first year the yield was about 5 berries per day.  The following year we were up to about 1/2 cup per day.  A few years back the plants started dying off.  I started planting the runners outside our fence, between the sidewalk and fence. They are doing pretty well.  Two years ago I topped out at over 30 pounds of berries picked (not including the ones we ate as we picked) and by last year I had a yield of just 15 pounds.  This year we have just a few plants left in the back yard and I am working to keep the other patch going.

 

Lastly you can see just a few raspberry canes inside the dog kennel and the pot of tulips just outside the fence.

What I don't show is the shed, the boat and all the supplies I have stacked up waiting to be used in projects.  I wish I didn't see them either!

Photos from April 12, 2015. 

Thanks for visiting.  Feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to know you stopped by.