Nine bags later, the backyard looks pretty good, doesn’t it? That’s until you see what’s hidden beside the garage. Thankfully, there’s no way that’s nine more bags worth of leaves…

This would be my backyard on Monday. I actually managed to get a fair amount of this pushed toward the back fence before I made the mistake of manually cleaning off the kidlet’s playscape, and the resulting wet state of my gloves gave me a charming blister on my thumb. So I’ve given that a

I finally remembered to take some pictures of the back garden today. I’m not sure why I’ve had a mental block on the back garden for the last month. It’s actually been doing pretty well back there, in some ways better than the side garden. (The side garden is definitely suffering from all the rain

The good news is, the garden is coming along. The phlox, liatris and echinacea are all blooming, and we’ve gotten a decent amount of rain, so everything is looking pretty lush. The bad news is, we’ve gotten a decent amount of rain, so the phlox, liatris and echinacea have all come in sideways, due to

The garden is coming along quite nicely. It’s actually fairly colorful the entire way down the line, on top of a great deal of various green foliage. I seem to have hit upon a fairly good mix to obscure the worst of the bulb foliage, so while a good chunk of that is still there,

A random hollyhock has appeared in my garden. Actually, after a little pondering, I’m fairly sure I’ve been weeding those out aggressively for the past four years. It is in the middle of the patch where the rose once reigned supreme, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s just so random! In other

My iris trifecta is complete. The Siberian iris are out and blooming. I do need to relocate these this year. They’re getting a little overrun by the bushes that used to be much further back when I first planted them where they are. Fortunately, they’re in a pot sunk in the ground, so they’ll be

I’ve got a lot of almost ready to fully blooms outside at the moment, due to all the rain. The pinks and Russian sage in the bottom two pictures have buds all over the place. I’ll actually be interested to see what they look like at the end of the weekend with all the heat.

My other two bearded iris are blooming, and have brought a bit of a mystery. The iris I had previously labeled as Harvest King in my last iris post is actually Chinese New Year 1996. That means that the top iris in this post is a Supreme Sultan Old. That leaves the bottom picture to