Spring Continues to Blossom

It only lasts for about 2 weeks, but I love it when my iris are in bloom.

Most of these plants are transplants from my grandfather's garden in Colorado. He and my grandmother got the tubers from family friends in the Northwest.

Of course I have some other flowers blooming as well. The Columbine are beautiful too.

The vegetable garden is coming along nicely. My peas have their first pods. Snickers jumped the fence the other night, though. We had one casualty: a tomato plant.

The Garden Grows

Hoping that the last freeze has come upon us, I transplanted our vegetables.

We've got corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, lettuce, hot peppers, cilantro, yellow squash, zuchinni, and cucumbers.

As you can see, I've installed fencing to keep all the wild animals out...including our dogs.

I'll keep you posted on how the veggies turn out. Jeff is all ready to make his fresh salsa. :)

My flowers are just starting to bloom. We're going on vacation near Charlottesville, VA this week. I hope I don't miss all of the iris while we're gone. They're just starting to come out.

Vegetable Garden

When we bought our house several years ago, I started a flower garden. This year I finally broke down and started a vegetable garden. I have many memories from my mom's vegetable garden during my youth. I have 3 distinct memories: 1. I hate pulling weeds. 2. I loved picking snow peas. However, it seemed that the garden didn't yield that many when I picked them as most of them ended up in my mouth rather than the bowl. 3. No matter how hard you look, a zucchini will be missed and grow to gigantic proportions. We planted a few seeds and started some seedlings. I was amazed how fast they grew. We're waiting until the threat of frost has ended before we put them in the ground. I'm looking forward to fresh vegetables and Jeff's fresh salsa.

Spring

The flowers are blooming. So are the weeds. I'm trying to kill them off and spread a few wood chips to keep them at bay.

The birds are nesting. Check out our resident killdeer (Charadrius vociferus). Since we moved in, we've had a pair of these birds nest in our yard. This year they chose our natural area instead of the yard where the lawn mower likes to wander. These birds nest on the ground. According to Wikipedia, "These birds will frequently use the "broken-wing act" to distract predators from their nests. This involves the bird walking away from its nesting area holding its wing in a position that simulates an injury and then flapping around on the ground emitting a distress call. The predators then think they have easy prey and are attracted to this seemingly injured bird and away from the nest. If the parent sees that a potential predator is not following them, they will move closer and get louder until they get the attention of the predator."