Watering System and Children's Garden

Of course we aren't doing housework! We just can't stay inside long enough. We really intended to paint our family room floor but then the cure time is 7-14 days, and that's a lot of stuff sitting in the rest of the house and no play room for the kids, which would be ok, since, like I said, we are spending most of our time outside. But what if it rains? Hmph. It's been so dry here that I think we've forgotten what rain is. Maybe tonight. It's a good thing Wally's rigged up a homemade watering system for our garden and blueberry bushes.

This is the pump Wally uses to pump water up from our creek. There are some deepish pools close by. (Enter pioneer twangy music). He moves the hosing to 3 different large barrels: 2 are set up in our garden area, 1 near our fence for watering stuff in the yard, and 1 for the blueberry bushes.

This barrel waters the blueberries. It has a soaker hose attached to it and looped around the base of each bush.

These are the 2 near our vegetable garden area.

Our garden.

The bottom barrel is the stand, the top holds the water.

We purchased the barrels off of craigslist. They used to hold vinegar!

Wally's filled nearly all of the ditches that he dug. We are waiting for rain to see how it goes! He also seeded and covered with hay, but grass just does not grow well in our yard ever. I don't think we know or want to invest in really trying to grow grass. Plus we have so much of this horrible invasive weed (dollar weed? or something) that it would take major major action to get a nice grass lawn.

We've been slowly working on the children's garden area. Grandmama gave us a large piece of her honeysuckle bush (non-invasive type with salmon kind of colored flowers). That's beneath the trellis in the middle. We have a clematis growing to the left too and the bricked around places are to keep the kids from treading on the cosmos sprouts. So hopefully it'll look a lot prettier soon.

Rhianwen had to be in all of these pictures.

A foamflower we got with Uncle Averett's money from Christmas. She planted this one.

Close-up of the foamflower.

Rhianwen behind the marginal wood fern. Supposedly "evergreen" but we'll see. It had 3 fern fronds that looked green mixed with dry brown. We hope to block the view of the chain-link fence with something. Hmmm.

Close-up of the fern. Not sure if those lumpy brown things were supposed to be above or below ground?

The oakleaf hydrangea (Snowflake). One little twig but good roots. I hope it'll do well. Supposedly it can get 4-6 feet tall. The leaves are really beautiful. There are more on it now that in the picture. I love it.

We planted a bunch of moss to start making a pathway and to kind of define various places. In this unseasonably hot weather, it's been a little sad, but I'm hoping it'll start looking greener now that the leaves on our trees are starting to protect that area of the garden. I hope to add some stepping stones of some sort to the pathway too. But the moss was free (lots in our woods) and stones are scarce there. I also planted some violets or maybe they are johnny jumpups that grow wild in an adjacent portion of the yard and a fern from our woods. I planted 3 bareroots of bleeding hearts (Japanese) but no signs of life yet. I don't really trust those packs that Walmart sells. I've had mixed results with the tubers/bareroots from there and Home Depot. Better to buy the plant I say.

I've also decided that we need a bunch of lumpy stones all in a row somewhere b/c Alden loves trying to walk across mine that make the border of my flower beds out front, but he always steps off onto ALL of my nice plants. It's really getting to me!

I dug all of the stinky bush, oh I mean, sweet shrub, from near our deck (don't worry Grandmama, there's still TONS left intact in our yard, and there are huge clumps from what I dug. You can have it ALL!). I hated that stuff. Now I have a nice empty square space. Rhianwen planted some sunflower seeds, and I'll be transplanting some hollyhocks there hopefully soon. But since those won't bloom until next year, I'm hoping the sunflowers will do well. They are the GIANT kind perfect for that location b/c our deck is really high up above that part of the yard. The kids just might get to see the flowers up close and personal from the deck! I really hope they grow.