What's in bloom?

Well, here we are, with another edition of the flowers showing off in the garden currently. I'm super excited about gardening here...we are only a week or so away from the frost free date here in zone 6a! This weekend, along with some room redo for my sister, I am planning to hit the Early Bird sale at our local garden center. They open from 7-9am and you get to take 20% off your entire purchase. I go every year and buy most of my annuals for the season. I love it--you walk in and they have fresh, hot coffee and donuts at the door. I'll snap some pics of some great plants I see there this Saturday...and I'll be sure to share pics of the room redo as well!

On to some of the stars...first up is a pic of the blooms on one of my catmint plant--Nepeta 'Walker's Low.'

This plant is a perennial that blooms nearly the entire growing season with pretty purple flowers. It spreads out wide, so give it room. The foliage is a nice dark green with a bit of silver to it.

Next up, a bloom from my chives. The blooms are really nice...and they are actually edible, also. You can put them in salads for visual interest

I also spotted a few blooms from my sage plant. To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen sage bloom before! It's kind of structural with a pinkish tint.

Last, one of my favorites....perennial geranium. The blooms on these plants are just gorgeous and they have a long bloom time during the summer. The color is really saturated and the veining in the blooms is so cool.

Have a great day!

Mother's Day pretties

This weekend, my helper and I put together some small planters for the moms in our lives. It was such a special day...since Charlie is five, he is way into making wonderful things!

We started with these...picked out specially for each mom.

And these:

The best part? Using a hammer and a nail to punch the holes out.

Charlie chose a ribbon to go with each flower. They made a nice centerpiece:

This particular flower was really cool! There is a new petunia out this year called 'Black Velvet' and the garden store was out of that one....but they had this one, called 'Pinstripe.'

And I got these....

Busy bee

May....one of my favorite months of the year, along with April. The landscapes look beautiful and everything is so fresh and green.

It also happens to be one of the busiest months of the year when you're both teachers...; ) Plus, this is Charlie's first year playing t-ball, so we have added that to our calendar!

I have been working on a few house projects, but nothing I'm ready to share quite yet. I have managed to get a few spring cleaning projects done. I cleaned out our closet and put away all of our mittens and winter hats.

It is so wonderful to finally put all of those bulky things away for the warmer months. I replaced them with summer shoes and lighter sweatshirts for the kids, as well as my summer hats....

I also find it handy to keep things like sunscreen there for when we are running out the door during the summer!

I also managed to find a dry day last weekend--we had 13 inches of rain in April--to get our windows washed. While I am not sure anyone would say cleaning is their favorite activity, this is one of my favorites to have done. The windows look so good when you are finished!

Happy Mother's Day to all of the moms out there!

Chair solution

I finally finished up the new office chair. I'm really excited about it...our old office chair was acutally one of our dining room chairs. Not super comfy and no arms to it! I spent some time scouring Craigslist, looking for a cool, retro chair....with no luck.

So, I found this old dud....

You can read all about its transformation here.

However, I had a small problem. I had covered the back of the backrest and in order to reattach the backrest, I had to put screws under the fabric. Uh-oh.

So, I had to reevaluate and I decided to cut open the back and cover the backrest with a gold fabric I had leftover from another piece of furniture.

It looked great, except for the scruffy edges. What to do? Upholstery tacks to the rescue.

It was not perfect for my first time, but it looks nice and to be honest, it adds a lot more interest to the chair than before I cut through the back and added the gold fabric! My confidence level is higher after having done this project. : ) The hardest part was folding down the fabric, spacing the tacks and not hammering my fingers in the process.

Here is the back all finished out....

And finally, the chair in the office!

Much better.

Guerrilla warfare

I'd like to share a website I love. Today, May 1st, is International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day!

This blog and website is written by a guy who lives in London and he started surreptitiously planting seeds and plants in empty or trash-filled garden beds around the city--he usually plants at night! I loved his idea of making something beautiful in a concrete jungle. It's fun to read about the planting escapades and the pictures are great....lots of before and after. It's about taking a little time and effort to make something pretty and that makes people happy.

Also, on his site, he had declared that Friday would be the "Royal Weeding" and all should go out and pull a few weeds for beautification! You can check it out here.

Although it's still not time for widespread seeding here, I may plant a few sunflower seeds today in honor of ISGG Day. I may also try to find a spot in my neighborhood that could use a few seeds as well! ; )

Office chair facelift

Along with multitudes of rain around here, I have also had a number of festering decor projects that have been neglected. I'll start to share in the next week. Some I have had to do just to get them out of my garage! Now that it is starting to get warm outside, playthings are taking over the garage and real estate out there is coveted. ; )

One of the latest is also one of my more ambitious projects. You may remember this chair from my Habitat For Humanity ReStore venture. Nondescript brown office chair.

Well, here is what it looked like after I took off all of the dusty, dull fabric.

You can see clearly in that shot all of the TOYS that live in the garage these days. As I said, this was quite ambitious for me, since it was a bit more involved than just recovering chair pads. There were two pieces to recover and I had to use foam on the seat and on the backrest. Before I cut the foam, I spray painted the wood with a semigloss black spray paint.

Here is my fabric. It is great for the black and gold scheme I have going on in our study.

The corners were a bit tough, but I eventually got them looking decent.

Please excuse the picture quality....it was dark outside and my garage lights are somewhat inadequate! Last, I had to screw in the backrest....

This threw a wrench in my plan, since I had to get inside the back of the backrest to screw in the screws. Hmm. Punting here....I'll let you know how that turned out. And of course, I'll take pics of my flub, too. : )

I'm thinking upholstery tacks.....

What's in bloom?

So.....you know what they say about April showers? I've had it! We are about one inch of rainfall away from breaking not only the record for the most rainfall in the month of April here in Cincinnati, we are close to breaking the record for the most rainfall in any month in history.

Awesome! I am so behind on spring projects....mulch and windows, especially. The grass is extremely green, which is nice...but it's growing way too fast! On the upside, all of my perennials are nice and lush. Here's to some nice, dry and warm weekends coming up soon!

Here is what is blooming this week....

This is the one tulip I have in our yard. Actually, it's Charlie's. He picked it out and planted it in his raised garden bed. I'm not too partial to tulips....they are not the most reliable of rebloomers (some consider them "annual" bulbs) and deer consider them a treat. However, after observing my neighbors' tulips this spring, perhaps I should give them another chance.

This plant is new to me. It is called sea thrift. I was not even sure when I bought it last fall when it blooms...it turns out that it blooms now! Nice color and nice bloom time when not much else besides bulbs are in bloom.

Last, we have these blooms on a tree in our yard:

We inherited this plant when we moved in...I think it is a star magnolia or a Jane magnolia. We transplanted it to a new spot last spring and it had a rough time during the drought-ish time last summer. It seems to be doing okay, although not a ton of blooms. If it doesn't get its act together in the next year or so....

I apologize for the picture quality! It was quite windy the day I took all of these and hard to keep the plants still while I snapped the pics. : )

Oh, and an update to the birds....the babies have hatched! They have tiny little beaks and no eyes yet.