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. 

Yard and Flowers for Today

I'm totally not going to apologize for this, but todays post is going to be INSANE picture heavy. For those of you that have slow internet, run do not walk, lol. So I went picture happy today so I'm going to split today's posts into two separate post. One post will be for flowers and the yard stuff, and one post will be for birds and bird feeders. Yes, there are THAT many pictures. Let's start with the front window garden area.

Short of this little girl mysteriously blowing up in a million pieces, be prepared to see her time and again for the lifetime of this blog :)

The new kid on the block. We went back to that same garden center and found this little beauty to match with my fountain. She is currently on the back deck of the house, but she will eventually work her way to the from of the house. I think I start to say that OVERALL my photography skills have stared to improve. I guess it doesn't hurt that I went out and splurged on a new Canon 60D :) My Dream camera has arrived.

My Mom visited this Spring for NY, and we planted a bunch of stuff. Amongst those plants are these two Bushes shown below (Update: both of these did not make it - like so many we planted too early this year and were fooled by the early warm weather). I'm glad I got these pictures of them, they definitely are beautiful and remind me of my Mother. 

Here goes the awesome photography I promised you guys, lol. I can't promise it will aways be this awesome, but it's a far cry from when I started this blog. I have to remember to take out my GOOD camera and get REAL pictures whenever I can.  The colors where speaking to me today!

Around the Yard..

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! 

Creating another new planting area

Today we decided to create a new planting area in a lonely spot in our yard. It faces the neighbors so we are thinking of doing some perimeter planting or bushes. My original thought for this area was Hydrangea bushes, but I think it's direct sunlight and too hot for that type of bush. We used our container garden pots to mark out 5 squares to dig up. 

We ended up planting butterfly bushes here that did well for a few years until I cut them back to the ground for winter. I killed those suckers real fast doing that, lol. I was pretty sure I read on the internet you were supposed to cut them down. Oh well, Kelly has called me a plant killer for ever and in this case I lived up to my nickname!