Black Velvet Petunia and a Frog - Ribbit

Today I spent a few hours taking some shots of flowers and testing out my new Canon 60D. I'm new at this, but I got some really cute shots. I even got a frog that has set up home in our pond area.  We draw in a lot of frogs with the ponds, there is quite the habitat forming there. We had this old birth bath (if you are a follower you would have seen this in a past post filled with orange water lol). It was just laying around in the back yard getting really yucky so we cleaned it up and brought it up front to plant in. We added some ivy from our back yard, a pretty center grass I picked up and the local nursery as well as Black Velvet Petunias. YES, you heard me correctly, Black Velvet. They were gorgeous and I have to do these again soon. 

This is a new plant below that we added this year. It is a Mini Columbine that I found at Lowes. I love love it, and so do the my Hummingbirds that visit this yard. I have went back several times to look for another one and I'm not able to find another. I will have to split this one, once it gets established. It is a perennial so it will come back each year.

Below are my Daisy's trying real hard to bud and flower. Can't wait to see what this one turns into. 

Below is another planter that Kelly and I threw together from some extra plants we had that did not make it into the ground.  We always end up with extra and this is a great way to incorporate them into the garden. 

This pink plant is new as well. I for the life of me can not remember the name? I do remember it's only an annual.  If anyone know definitely leave it below in the comments. I know somewhere in this house I have the plant tag for this (I save my tags every year). When I found it I will update this post with the name. 

Ground cover is fun as well. The chick in Hens is super pretty and the white plant is a type of Baby's Breathe. Very pretty and great for covering bald spots.  Our Garden is really new so, so until it gets established it will have lots of bare spots! 

Next up is my Frog. It was really cool to see them start living in our pond. It's awesome that we have created a beautiful bird, animal and flower habitat in a place where there was only overgrown half dead brush. I'm learning a lot about gardening as I go along. 

Cleaning Up More Flower Beds

Today we cleaned the right side of the house. We had some serious overgrown weeds all over the place and some over grown ornamental grass that needed some serious attention. It was spreading all over the place and needed to be tamed.  We had done some cleaning in this area before, but today we will add the final touches. 

We needed a method for confining the wild grass and Kelly came up with a great idea to use our left over flower bed pavers to keep the grasses isolated just around the satellite dish area. I did not want the grass growing into the near by bush you see here in the above picture. It was overwhelming the bush and killing it.  As you can see we confined it! 

(Update 2014 - The above picture makes me really sad. Maddie is in the picture , The grey colored cat, and she went missing just after this picture. It was a heartbreaking lose for my husband and I. Very sad to see her in these pictures, it seemed things were so perfect than. A perfect moment in time). 

Cleaning up some messy spots in the yard

Kelly and I are at it again. We have a few eye sores that have been bugging us for a while and we finally decided to tackle them. First up is this tree. Out here in the country Black Rat Snakes can get into the yard really easy, especially if you have tall weeds and grass at the base of your tress. We decided as an experiment to do this one up and lay in some gravel to give it a manicured look. In hind sight, I wish we hadn't used 'white' gravel, it's a bit on the tacky side, but it was what we had at the time. We can always refresh and update it if the need arrises.

Below, we also had another eye soar in the yard. The prior owner thought it would be a good idea to put bricks around this tree. As you can see below, it was really hurting and looking sad.  It wasn't easy, but Kelly dug out what he could. 

Finally, below is a peak at our new raised flower bed which I really love. For now it only has a few lonely flowers in it, but I hope to fill it up soon :) 

More yard project and flowers coming soon...

Halloween is here again

It's that time of year folks for our Halloween decorations to go up. Unfortunately this year I focused more indoors than I did out doors with my pictures. I do have a few outside shots so I am going to include them here. THEY ARE BEYOND TERRIBLE, and I'm a little embarrassed to put them out there, but it's all I got. They were taken at night, but an outside picture is still an outside picture, even if it's blurry and impossible to see :) 

One thing I know for sure is check out my Giant Marigolds coming down the side of the walk way on the right. Kelly added a bed to that side of the walk and did Giant Marigolds, and BAM those thing bloomed like wild fire. It's October and they are still going strong. Say hi to the creepy hanging skelton that kinda looks like he is staring at you, LOL!!! Are you curious what Kelly was for Halloween this year? CREEEEEPY is what he was with a Capitol 'C', lol. You can throw SCARY in that too.  Smile Boys!

Stay tuned for some wonderful new projects coming up for 2012!

Hummingbird Feeders

Today I added Humming Bird feeders to the new window garden area. This blog IS called BIRDEES and BLOOMS, so it's reasonable to say I need to start posting some bird stuff. Let's try and gets some birds in this yard. I figured Hummingbirds would be fairly easy to pull in, and my research says this area is loaded with them. I never seen one in my area of NY, so I'm quite excited at the possibility of seeing them here. Now that I have these awesome flowers every where I'm seriously starting to take a major interest in birds. I'm a novice, but with some research on the internet I have started a game plan for getting some birds to come hang out with us in our lovely new garden area. My cats should just LOVE that, lol. 

I am going to apologize for my bad photography skills here again. IX-NAY on the vertical pictures and the cheesey ball frame!!! Hopefully the Hummingbirds forgive me and come for some yummy food anyway.

Bring on the Hummingbirds...

Redoing the front window garden area

So the time has come for us to do some major overhauling to the front window garden area. It needs some well needed love and TLC.  Step one, strip everything from that area including the pines that had kine-rot on each side.  It's crazy how enormous this bed is now that it's completely cleared out. I think it makes the front of the house look bugger, and it's going to fun to plant up! 

Do you see it?...I'm not sure you can...I know you see it...I can see it. The gorgeous little girl fountain pouring water out of her watering can makes me so happy. I am so in love with fountain. I have always wanted a water feature in my yard before, and this was the perfect fit. The instant I saw her sitting in the garden shop I knew I had to have her. I have a feeling this lovely little girl is going to be gracing my window garden area for many years to come. We used sand to level her out prior to pouring in the mulch.

We both worked so hard, and this is the final result. We worked on it all day, as you can see by the picture, the sun started going down. This is the start of a good thing. I can only picture gorgeous gardens planted here year after year. Below is a picture of my fountain in action. So loving it! 

More pictures to come! 

What, you have a pond now?

All I can say looking back now is, "darn it"!!! For this year we did a raised garden bed and a pond, and all my pictures of these processes apparently went to the birds, because I can't find them. I'm too sad to think about it, but what I can do is post some pictures of the new items and just hope one day those original pictures magical show up. It was a lot of work for Kelly to dig this pond out, and it saddens me to think the pictures of the process are lost.

Here is the completed pond. We never had one, so this too is a learning thing for us too. We kind of just went with it, hahaha. I think it looks pretty good and Kelly loves it so that is all that matters! I love this statue that sits by the pond, slightly creepy, but cute lol.

Please do not judge me on this part. This is a FAKE lily pad. Yes, you heard me right ...FAKE. I have always wanted real lily pads, so I will have to see what I can do about that. I need to do some reading to even see if this type of plant is growable in such a small pond as this one. I didn't want anything too big, just a water source for the birds. Future research will be needed to determine if this FAKE plant stays or not, lol.  I can say one thing though, my photography skills are starting to improve greatly.

Spring of 2010 is just around the corner. I do not have any plants up yet for this year, so we are cleaning up from the yucky winter and getting ready. Kelly also added this awesome new planting area near my walk way.  I am not sure what I will put there yet, but something fun will be headed to that spot soon.

Kelly worked extremely hard today, but one thing I can say is I am really starting to love doing outside work. It is so nice to finally have a real yard.  Kelly is cleaning up some stray gravel from out drive. It's not in the best shape, and one day we hope to have it redone.

Favorite Window Garden

I moved out here to Missouri in 2008, from New York.  My boyfriend, ow husband, owed this house for several years before we met and did very minimal gardening for the few years he was here.

This garden was planted in July of 2008 and is one of my all time favorite gardens that we have set up in the front window. If you look closely you can see two tomato plants there as well. It may seem like a silly place to put them, but those were the best tomatoes we ever yielded to date. It must have been beginners luck. Over all, I just loved the colors this small little garden brought to the front of the house. 

The pine tress are still up at this point. These trees do not stick around for long. They end up getting a disease that turns them brown, and they eventually have to be pulled up. Kelly and I are not really fans of these pine trees to start with, so they would have been pulled up regardless of disease or not.  Photography skills are not at a prime here, check out our reflections in the windows, lol :)

The only thing I disliked about this garden was this hummingbird feeder. It leaked something terrible, but it was pretty to look at. It caused a major ant problems and I have upgraded since.

I was really wanting to say my photography skills improved here, and then the good ole reflection picture had to ruin it all and now these unsightly vertical shots.  It's all a learning thing with photography just like everything else. Practice is the key here, and I will need lots of it. I promise as this blog goes on you will see an improvement to my pictures. In current times, 2015, I have a Cannon 60D.