Brandice.net Blog

Are you ready to see the fruits of our hard labor throughout the month of May? Here’s a grand tour of our front and back yards just before our Memorial Day cookout. :) It rained overnight and blew some leaves and whatnot into the new mulch, but it still looked great and we’re really proud of what we’ve done with the joint.

Note the new table and chairs for the deck. We didn’t want a huge table to take up our limited deck space, so we opted for this small table that fits nicely with the built-in bench and came with great, swiveling/tilting chairs. :)

This is the view when you come out onto the deck and turn left. Note my thriving hen & chicks in the little tree bed, and Jim’s grill down on the patio! The towels are from storm clean-up before the cookout… it was soggy.

Patio view… the glider in the corner matches table and chairs on the deck. Door goes into the garage.

This is the view from the back of our yard, dogs and all. I can’t even tell you how much I still love that flowering dogwood growing out of our deck, even after the HUGE mess it made when the flowers fell off. Because of the trees, our back yard is mostly shade-central all day long, which is fantastic.

Walkway out to the side of the house. Dug up the stepping stones and replanted them after mulching.

This is the area that gets the most sun, so put the raised beds for veggies here. The bed on the left gets full sun, and the bed on the right gets half-to-3/4 sun. Leaving a lot of open space so that we have room for new ideas next year, etc. We did the walkway the night before.

The front of the house really just needed some weeding and mulching, and we’ve mostly left it alone. I love the Japanese maple and the thriving rose bush.

And finally, here’s a little taste of what we got grownin’ ’round these parts. :) Everything’s still alive so far, but we just planted it, so hopefully my pale green thumb will keep it all going!

Man, oh man, has it ever been a productive weekend! I’ve planted the second raised garden bed with marigolds, herbs and onions, the first raised bed is full of veggies (peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, two kinds of lettuce). We’ve spread seven cubic feet of mulch throughout all of the beds (which looks BEAUTIFUL), cleaned off the deck from the dogwood flower-shedding mess, hosed off the lawn chairs, hooked up the converted gas grill (had to be adapted to use a propane tank since we don’t have a gas line), and along the way Mae found a nest of baby bunnies and killed one of them, so I buried it under my redbud tree.

Now we’re going to eat lunch and then head to Home Depot/Lowe’s for some gardening items I want to get (window boxes! more succulents! deck table!), and then off to BJ’s Wholesale for food/supplies for the big cookout tomorrow.

I had a GREAT run after all that mulching yesterday, which was a huge boost right before my 5K tomorrow. I went almost an entire mile before my breathing became labored at all and the sky had that post-sunset glow along the horizon, and I possibly managed hop the fence to the closed track twice (a LOT harder to get back over the fence after a long run, or at least I imagine it would be if I had done it). Not saying I did, just mentioning a hypothetical situation. ;)

I hope you’re all having a beautiful Memorial Day weekend! Pics to come once I clean up and get the camera out.

Woo hoo!! Got lots o’ planting done this past weekend with my friend Tim. :)

First we planted the Eastern Redbud that my mother gave me for my birthday:

We also planted this Mountain Fire Pieris that I picked up the other day on a whim:

And there’s the Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick tree, which Makai peed on LITERALLY ten seconds after it was in the ground and officially planted… *sigh*

We also planted a Dwarf Korean Lilac bush, a lily of some sort that Jim bought me, and three Salvia plants (one of which both dogs has trampled at least six times since).

Go Garden Brandice, Go!

There are very few things that I can keep alive other than myself at this stage in my life… My cat seems to be fairing well (although my husband is the one to remember to feed her most of the time), I once had a fiddler crab that kept my interest for almost a year, and I can grow hen and chicks.

What’s even cooler? (Other than that I took the above picture and don’t seem to have totally screwed it up with my very undeveloped photography abilities.) The hen and chicks I happen to be growing in my dark red pot this year are descendants from the very hen and chicks that my mother planted at my great-grandmother’s house when she was a child.

They are very special hen and chicks. :) AND, you can accidentally leave them out in the elements all winter and they’ll perk right up come spring. That’s my kind of plant!

What are you growing in your garden (or on your apartment window sill) this year?