More from the garden

For those of you who might like a more detailed look at our back yard, we've taken some photos showing the spring blooms.

We are thrilled with how our yard looks - when we bought the home, since it was empty so long, and it was late fall/almost winter, everything looked drab and the weeds were growing like crazy. Now that the weeds are pretty well cleared out - that's an ongoing chore of course - we see so many plants blooming.

For the amount of money we've spent so far on flowers (not much), it all looks surprisingly lovely!

Our first rose in the back planters - we have this pink cabbage rose, and a red rose bush in the back, and six red rose bushes in the front. They are all flowering now, too.

This is taken from a spot right in front of our bedroom sliding door. At the moment, following Stacey's work over the weekend, there are more mums in the planter directly in front, next to the yellow-flowering bush.

From the same spot, towards the rest of the yard.

From the corner in front of that yellow-flowering bush. The white sweet alyssum is growing like a weed, which is great news as far as I'm concerned.

And the rest of the yard. Stace loves kicking the football (soccer) in the grass. The structure in the bed is what Stace built to protect the edible garden from the squirrels - and possums. Our neighbor tells me that the opossums are just as much of a problem eating their tomatoes each summer as the squirrels! And we didn't even know we had opossums in our neighborhood! I have seen a skunk, though. We also see hawks and turkey vultures all the time, and lots of other pretty birds. The big trees over our yard drop a ton of leaves to rake, but they also bring in a lot of nice wildlife.

Not everything in our yard has gone swimmingly. See the little yellow petals on the ground? Those would be from the single iris bloom I was so excited to see. The bud was about to open, and I could just make out that it was going to be yellow, when Cora used some of her backyard time to strip it to pieces. Of all the flowers, she had to pick the one that blooms once a year, and was to be the only iris we would have had! I'm hoping beyond hope that it will put out another bud.