Spring is springing up everywhere, and here's proof...
Our ornamental cherry tree has had buds on it for a week or two, but today on my trip to the mailbox, I noticed how much it's blooming already, and it smells so lovely! I broke off a little twig and brought it inside so now I have a spring of spring right in my kitchen.
Don't forget to set your clocks ahead an hour tonight -- if, of course, you live in an area that observes daylight savings time!
Don't forget to set your clocks ahead an hour tonight -- if, of course, you live in an area that observes daylight savings time!
I have plenty of roses, which are my birth flower, and Brandon's. Year before last, we planted some asters, which are Kathryn's birth flower. Ken's birth flower is the gladiola, and I wanted to plant some of those, too. Then this showed up this year. And I can NOT, for the life of me, remember planting it. I'm not always good about writing down everything in my garden journal, but I am great about saving plant tags, and I don't have one for this. I have no idea how it got here, but I love the creamy yellow color.
When I go out to the garden, particularly in the morning, the aroma of my lavender, roses, and gardenias mixes in with a bit of honeysuckle and assorted other flowers, and I am absolutely convinced that heaven must smell just like that.
Because they will eat each other if they don't have anything else to eat, and because there were SO many of them, we went ahead and released most of them all around the yard. Ken said he felt like a praying mantis farmer. We decided to set the egg case out in the garden so that any remaining mantises could emerge there. At least one mantis was still on it; you can see it if you look closely. (That's Ken holding the egg case.)
When all the mantises were crawling around in their "pagoda," they were creeping me out a little, probably because they looked like ants and it made my skin crawl. However, I know the good they do and even had one briefly as a pet (when I was a kid), so I'm not afraid of them. Guess I just don't like any large number of insects! Once we'd let some of them out, I wasn't creeped out anymore and didn't mind one or two on my hand as I released them on various plants. I felt like a pretty cool nature-studyin' mama letting one sit on my finger while taking a photo. {smile}
We tried to keep a few, but I think we waited too long to capture some tiny insects for them to eat, and those all died. We're hoping that most of the ones we released survived and will get big and strong eating things like japanese beetles! {bwa ha ha ha ha!} This little guy--or gal--is sitting on a rose leaf, and you can see on the closest leaf that something has already been nibbling there. Do your bug-eating thing, little mantis!
I took the above photo of "Rose Cottage" yesterday. Our front yard has finally filled in bare spots from where there was a huge island of big pine trees when we bought the house four years ago. Last year there was just a small bald spot remaining, but it's nice and green now. Hurray! When we moved in, there was a very definite line between our neighbor's beautiful yard and ours, but now when they're both mowed you really can't tell anymore. Ours does have more weeds (noticible when the grass is in need of mowing!) but since ours is a do-it-yourself deal and she has a lawn service, we're pretty tickled to have ours looking as good as it does; we can deal with weeds later! 
Here's one of my first roses of the year; they are not in full bloom yet, so Rose Cottage isn't as rosy as it will be later this summer! We've had so many rainy days lately that I haven't had much chance to work in the garden, but I still can't bring myself to complain about the rain since we've been in such a drought for so long! I think my plants and trees will grow by leaps and bounds if this rain keeps up through the summer. Anything that has survived must be fairly strong by now because we've had watering bans for the last few years; if the plants got even a little drizzle of water once a week or so, they were glad for it. Our one little ol' rain barrel just couldn't water everything, especially when there wasn't much rain to refill it. So far, however, this year has been very wet, which is a very good thing! This is our path (I like that better than "sidewalk") from the driveway to the front door; some of the plants spill over their boundaries, but I actually like that. Makes it feel less concrete sidewalkish and more cottage-path-like.
Hidden among all of this is one of my favorite flowers, a columbine, which means "dovelike." 
Our lavender is doing it's part to attract bees and keep them happy.
I am w-a-y behind in weeding, and we didn't add all the compost I wanted to at the beginning of spring. We've transplanted a few things, and they are all doing well, even the rose I thought I'd killed. We've also planted a few new things in the flower garden, including purple balloon flowers, purple phlox, vinca, and a few lantana. I love the purple lantana, and so do the butterflies; it's one of the few annuals we go to the trouble of planting. We also planted a pink and yellow lantana near our dearly departed dog Ellie's grave because she loved chasing butterflies.
Ken wrestled our birdbath and finally got it level. That was surprisingly hard, because the dirt kept settling oddly. Everything is getting so big in the birdbath garden that I'll be dividing some of it--especially the sedum and the purple irises--and eventually expanding this bed. I have a grand plan of more shrubs and flowers and less grass, but it's a gradually process! What I call the "birdbath bed" is full of purple irises, sedum, a huge bee balm, my small lilac, a miniature yellow rose, a pinkish-purple mum, candytuft, a purple phlox, lavender, a peony that bloomed for the first time this year, and a few other plants. The only thing that was here originally was the dogwood tree; everything else--as is the case in all of our gardens--has been planted within the past three years. 
They're done blooming now, but these are one of my varieties of irises. I also have a solid deep purple that I love. Both varieties will need to be divided this year, so I'll spread them out, plant some in other areas of our gardens, and give some away.
We actually have peaches this year. Small, but peaches nonetheless. This is The Peach State, after all, so I am not a true Georgia gardener without at least one peach tree! Our apple trees bloomed nicely but I can't remember when I should start seeing little apples (because I haven't yet). Can you see the cute little peach in this photo?
Ken and Kathryn made another square for our raised veggie garden. We use cedar because it doesn't rot, and doesn't have all the scary chemicals like pressure treated wood. This year we've planted jalapeno and cayenne peppers (Ken loves peppers!), melon (my first time growing them), and cucumbers. I've got a big tomato in a pot in the big flower bed out front, and a cherry tomato all lonesome in our new garden square. 
We bought three yellow tomato plants (my fave!) but with all the porch building and everything else going on, I just didn't get them planted soon enough and they died. I hope to have time soon to run up to our local nursery and see if they have any more. Yellow tomatoes have a wonderful flavor, but less acid, so I can eat them without getting the mouth ulcers that regular tomatoes give me. I also let Kathryn's strawberry plant die, so I hope to get another one of those, too. After we've enlarged the fenced area of our backyard, perhaps later this year, we plan to have two more garden boxes to give us plenty of space for planting next year's garden.
Nature Study: The Great American Bird Count ended on Monday. I was going to share our tallies with you, but I think I must've thrown away my sheet after entering the numbers in online. Oops! Whether you participated or not, you can see the tallies for the 
I love my mums, too, and this one looked so pretty with the dew still on it. 
(One of my Japanese Maple leaves. They are so delicate!)
Kathryn's nature journal entry this time consisted of leaf-rubbings and a paragraph about maple syrup; her favorite part of this nature study consisted of tasting maple syrup and daydreaming about living somewhere that would allow us to harvest sap for syrup like Laura Ingalls and family. She told me all about how the Ingalls family did it, and remembered it in great detail. The bit about drizzling hot syrup on fresh snow sounds like a lovely idea to us both. Yum! Unfortunately, there aren't many opportunities for such a thing here in Georgia. {sigh}
Not long ago we learned about the life cycle of a ladybug, and although the adult beetles are pretty cute (as far as insects go), I can't say that about the larvae. However, we learned that one larva can eat about 25 aphids each day, and an adult ladybug can eat more than 50! Come on down to my flower gardens, little "ladies"! We also learned that a ladybug's spots fade as it ages, AND we learned that a few ladybugs went up in the space shuttle for an experiment to see whether aphids did better or worse at getting away from their ladybug predators without gravity in the equation. As it turn out, John, Paul, George, and Ringo (so named by the astronauts) were fat and happy in a micro-gravity environment!
How do you like my cute vinyl strawberries tablecloth? It was on clearance last summer for $3! This way we can still be cheerful and cute while not making a big mess in the kitchen. I just love cute and functional! This week, we combined art and nature study; isn't it fun combining subjects?! We finally did one of the great watercolor lessons on 
We've been blessed with a lot of rain this week! After years of extreme drought, this is wonderful, even if it does make getting the grass cut a bit more difficult. All of our plants and trees and our birds have been loving the rain. Kathryn told me, "God really did do a great job of planning everything, because there are lots of thunderstorms in the summer, and the flowers bloom in summer, so that's when they need the rain." 
Our sunflower seeds have sprouted! Yippee! And Kathryn's little coneflower seedling is growing very slowly, it seems, but we were thrilled it survived a drowning rain of an unexpected heavy downpour. The daylillies are still blooming, the lantana is growing well, and the mums and our purple butterfly bush both began blooming this week! The big coneflowers in our garden started blooming last week, as did the crepe myrtle by the front of the house. Somehow, in previous years I had never noticed that the bright pink blooms also have quite a bit of yellow in them. Kathryn and I looked closely, and realized that what we thought were several flowers was really one flower, and she pointed out right away where the pollen is! Can you see all the little flower parts! [click the photo to enlarge]
