A Garden Anniversary

Well, I’m cheating. In May my 10 year anniversary of blogging happened. But I am just adding that note on to this week’s garden report. Can’t hardly believe I’ve been writing here for ten years. A lot has happened and changed in my life since I started. I’ve been to Africa and Haiti, and I’m retired from my work as a NICU nurse. I turned into an art quilter, and a part time rug hooker. But let’s not forget–the main reason I started my blog was because I lost weight and wanted to talk about all things related to that. Weight maintenance is so much different than weight loss. ITS FOREVER. I am still maintaining 60 pounds loss. And most importantly, I believe I have a much healthier life than before. My diet has gone from being meat and sweets-centric, to being really a vegetable and fruit-centric diet. With some dairy and eggs thrown in 🙂 Its not that I don’t eat meat–I do. Its just not as important to me as it used to be. Sweets are still important to me, but they are GREATLY moderated compared to my former life. And exercise is a hugely important part of my life. I exercise 6 days a week–3 at the gym and 3 at home. Recently I started a couple of new exercises that I am enjoying. I do “tabata intervals” on my walk, which really gets me huffing and puffing. And I finally tried out the elliptical at the gym. It uses different muscles, so I am working up slowly on it, but I do enjoy it.

And now on to the garden!

I had more tree work done. My original idea was to just get some branches trimmed up. But when I asked Kevin (MLG) what he would do, he suggested getting rid of a few trees. Eight to be exact! Here is Logan way up in the tree, working on getting it down without damaging any of my garden plants. Which, amazingly, he was able to do!

There was a nest of baby birds on one of the branches! They moved the nest over here, but we’re pretty sure the babies flew away. They had feather.

My new part time neighbors planted some veggies. I told them I would water them while they were gone. I treated myself to some of their amazing roses.

Are these called Button flowers? Anyway, its taken a while but I finally have two clumps of them that are blooming consistently. I really like them.

My pink rose.

I decided to try some dahlias this year. And you can see I have a couple of salvia plants over there too. And yay! some more room for planting something or other 🙂

The columbines have been amazing this year. They usually self-sow, so I hope that is happening.

Trying this delphinium again. Its more of a bush-type. Its such a great blue color.

I love these little flowers. They look like they have no centers. Its a slow growing perennial. I do hope it will make it and grow. I would like to have it everywhere in my yard !

And this big yellow flower. Can’t remember the name. I had one last year at the end of summer. It did not make it with some of the transplanting we did. Its planted next to the pink rosebush in the next picture.

Can you see all the buds on this bush? They are simple little roses, but so fun to see it doing so well.

And I’ll end with this. I’m going to rug camp again (LOL, its not really camp because its held at a luxury resort,) and this is my finished rug from a previous year that I will bring to share in the rug show that they have. Camp is down in Cambria which is right next to the ocean. I love going there.