Candy Tuft

Back when we first moved into our house, I bought a plant of candy tuft. It's a perennial that grows really well where we live.  I had no idea how it would do, since I tend to not do so well with plants. (I guess I should change that mentality and tell myself that I do really great with plants and can grow anything...) Anyway, I bought a bunch of other perennials too, but the candy tuft was the only one that survived.

Year after year, the candy tuft would continue to grow bigger and more beautiful. I got compliments all the time on it when it was in bloom. That was the one downfall really, it bloomed for about three weeks, looking absolutely gorgeous, and then it was just green the rest of the time.

No matter how badly I neglected the candy tuft, it seemed to do better and better. This was the ideal flower for me!

Well, last year I decided to be really good and have a pretty flower garden. I even trimmed my candy tuft, thinking it would be like my other perennials and prefer this treatment. I thought, that maybe it would help the flower grow even bigger and better.

Alas, it was not to be. I killed my candy tuft! By paying attention to it, feeding it, watering it, and taking care of it, I killed it! I cannot believe it. For once in my life, I actually killed a plant by paying too much attention to it.

Oh well. I guess I will have to plant more flowers there this year!

Summer

It has been an interesting summer. A really hot and dry one, more than normal.

Last year when we went camping we had just laid some free sod we got from our friends. We bought a water timer and set up sprinklers to make sure the grass would get watered. I envisioned lush green grass upon our return...only to my heartbroken dismay, the grass not only wasn't green, it was brown. Everyone told me not to worry, and that it would come back, but I knew in my heart that it hadn't just gone dormant, it had died. (People with black thumbs like myself have an intuition about these kinds of things!) And, I was right.

The water timer had malfunctioned, and the grass all died.

This year when we went camping, again we set up the water timer, only this time it was for my flower bed, because I told Shane if we came back and all my flowers were dead, I would be even more sad than I was about the grass. As a backup Shane asked our neighbor to monitor our flowers and make sure they got watered.

The water timer malfunctioned AGAIN.

So, what is the lesson here? Don't buy a water timer that is for use with hoses and sprinklers! :) Thankfully, this time, because of our neighbor, our flowers did get watered, and weren't completely dead when we got home.

While we were camping we experienced the first bout of hot temperatures. In Salt Lake they were experiencing 100+ degree weather. Where we were, at our camp spot it was about 92 degrees, and everywhere else it was 98-99 degrees. Shane took one of our window unit air conditioners with and attached it to our trailer since we had electricity at our campspot. I was so glad he did! Also because of the hot weather, we went on lots of outings in our air conditioned SUV.

We had fun, but it was very HOT. I really don't do HOT very well.

Then on the drive back from camping, we drove through an area with a tornado warning (unbeknownst to us at the time) and had quite the drive through horizontal rain and heavy winds. I told Shane after that I had started praying the whole way through the storm because the wind was blowing hard enough I was worried it would flip the trailer and our suv with it. He told me that I wasn't the only one praying. :) We made it through safely, which we were both grateful about. All the kids were fast asleep at the time, which was also a blessing.

We ended up coming home a day earlier than we had initially planned on originally, because Harrison was leaving for scout camp that Saturday morning. We were glad that was the case though, because it made it so we could go celebrate some things with our friends that we would've missed out on if we hadn't come home early.

Poor Little Blackberry

I love to eat berries. All types of berries. For years my favorite was strawberries, but when I got older I developed an allergy to them. This made me very sad because strawberries are easy to grow and harvest, and as a consequence are cheaper to buy at the store.

So, I try to grow the other types of berries that I can eat. I don't do a very good job of it and I'm not terribly successful at it, but I try.

When we first moved into our house eight years ago I decided to plant some thornless blackberry starts. Well...that has been an interesting adventure! The first year I had it, it grew one berry, and it was yummy. The next year my son decided it looked like a stick because leaves hadn't grown on it yet, and he cut it to the ground. The next year he did it again. He was five and six at the time, if I remember right.

Every year, something has happened to this poor blackberry start to prevent it from growing. It was finally starting to recover the last few years, enough so that this year I was looking forward to actually having a crop of blackberries...and then, when my father in law was over helping us smooth out dirt in our yard....he backed over it with the tractor.

So, we are back at ground zero. Maybe it will produce beautiful blackberries for whoever ends up buying our house!

Flower power

Almost every year I get a flower for mother's day from church. It's typically a geranium, and it usually dies, sitting patiently on my counter waiting for me to plant it. This happens with other plants too, unfortunately.

Well, this year, surprise! I not only have been watering my geranium, I planted it today!

When we moved into our house I was so excited it had window boxes. That excitement soon dwindled when I discovered how difficult flowers are to grow in window boxes. I'm bad at difficult gardening. I barely make it at super easy no matter how hard you try this plant won't die gardening.

Still, I came up with a plan... I removed the dirt from the window boxes, bought some terracotta pots, and planted geraniums in all the pots. Then, when we get the window boxes painted and hung, I will put the terracotta pots in the window boxes.

After the season is over, it will be easy to remove the terracotta pots for winter.

This all sounds great in my head and on here...we will see how it works in real life! I decided on terracotta pots because they are cheap, and they hold in moisture, hopefully helping the flowers stay moist enough from day to day. That's the hard thing about window boxes. They get hotter than other places, and dry out a LOT faster. So, we'll see!

This will hopefully help our house have better curb appeal too.