New blooms in great-grandpa's garden

Last year the lilies Great-Grandpa shared with me came up, but weren't sturdy enough yet to bloom.

This year, however, we're going to get a decent showing, and I finally get to see what color they are!

From the looks of it, they're going to be a beautiful deep pinkish corally red.

Garden help

With a week long visit from my parents' friend from Wisconsin, we were able to get the front garden by the driveways weeded and mulched (with a thick layer of newspaper - free and ugly - and a thin layer of Menards' cheapest mulch), despite my being 36 weeks pregnant.

The girls were often swirling around nearby, and I was grateful for Rinnah's help throwing a few more annuals into the gap at the bottom that's just a little too close to the salt and the plow to be good for much. I've still got to figure out which perennials will be good down there.

I also gained a few plants (down here all sedum) from our neighbors who are moving and wanted a place to stash some perennials until they find a new place. Even better, she planted them for me, since the ground is a long way down these days! The sharing is definitely part of the fun of a garden.

Hydrangeas

"Mom, can I pick one of your white flowers - the big ones?"

Garden style

Who knew that disassembled bleeding hearts could make such great dress-up jewelry?

Great-grandpa's garden

The day after the blizzard...

It looks a little different out there in the yard this year than it did a year ago yesterday!

 or a year ago today!

Syrup

Even when nothing is growing in the garden, there are still opportunities to take advantage of its productive opportunities. We've been tapping our maple trees, and those of two or three of our neighbors since Reuben was a very small boy. It's now become one of his very favorite activities of the whole year, and he takes the work very seriously.

Tapping the trees - we use old milk jugs to catch the sap.

Matt's been using a three-pan system for the last two years. This makes the whole process go a lot faster, and he's been able to get a lighter syrup for the finished product, too.

Just to the left of center you can see a big cylinder of ice he pulled out of his holding bucket, using the Native American trick of just freezing off the water and getting a head start on concentrating the sap to get to the proper sugar content.

The whole rig in all its glory. Those cinder blocks are slowly crumbling - every year it's a little more "riggish" and one of these years he's going to have to purchase some new ones! (These are all still left over from the demolition during remodeling at our church years ago.)

Reuben's beloved job is to feed the fire.

 And the finished product from the first boil: nearly two gallons of beautiful, pure, home grown and home made maple syrup!

An off year

 Walking around the yard this year is a little bit challenging, and a real reminder of how much time we're needing to invest on the human side of the Motley Garden this year! The plant side is really taking a hit.

But this single plant, coming around the corner from the garage to the vegetable garden, is a bright smile - this is a cosmos that seeded itself from the annuals that Sam gave us last year. What a fun little bright gift.

 Because this is what we mostly grew in the vegetable garden this year. Weeds, weeds, and more weeds. Weeds of all kinds, and many taller than I am. And all going to seed. Underneath those weeds are some poor pathetic pumpkin and squash plants that the girls and I quickly stuck in the ground this spring, but I doubt the poor light-starved plants have produced anything. There are also potatoes hiding in there, too, sprouted from the ones that we didn't find last fall. It will be interesting to see if they amount to anything if we (hopefully!) can get out there to dig them up.

 But, ah, tomatoes. It's hard to go wrong with tomatoes. They, too, are feeling the effects of neglect - no water when it's hot, no weekly tying up and pruning, no regular picking, but still - look at those beauties that grace our table!!

And there was one plant that did survive, and is finally flourishing: the pie pumpkins! We have at least a dozen 8" pumpkins trying to turn orange before the growing season is over.

 And then there's THIS ... thing. It came up by itself. It's growing the most incredible, large (14-18") warty pumpkins! Won't these be fun to put on the steps in a few weeks?? There's one beautiful orange one, and two or three more giving it their best effort.

 And, up in the front, the eggplants are thriving. We're giving them away to friends (and strangers! That was a fun story. Matt was at the kitchen window and saw a woman walking on the path stop to look at our plants. He ran out and told her to help herself! So she came back the next day and did...and came back a few hours later with a two-serving helping of what she had made complete with recipe. It was good. We made it again! Still don't know where she lives or what her name is! We'd love to plant more edibles by the path garden next summer with a sign saying, "Enjoy!") and we're trying to eat some of them ourselves.