Back to the Future: May

Here is what our house looks like now.

Here is what my garden looks like as of May 15th. We have gotten about 30 cherry/pear tomatoes, 10 strawberries, 5 pea pods, and 7 squash from it so far. I have tasted everything and it’s all very yummy. I have banana peppers and bell peppers growing – but no watermelons yet. This has been a fun experiment and I’m glad we tried it out.

Here is a close up of my straight neck squash growing.

A sampling of one day’s bounty

We discovered that the trees behind our fence are actually part of a tree farm. For the past week they have been clearing them away, to replace them with young pine trees. We’re sad to lose our trees, but Adam talked them into leaving us a 25 foot buffer, so it won’t be completely bare. All of this activity has brought some wildlife into our back yard. Here is a hawk perched on top of our mostly dead oak tree. We have also seen squirrels in our yard for the first time.

Here’s a ‘before’ picture of our backyard trees. (Note: we plan on replacing the mostly dead oak tree with a red maple very shortly.)

Here’s what it looks like now. A bit thinner, but not too bad. The ironic thing is that they only clear the land every 75 – 100 years. So, I guess we don’t have to worry about this ever happening again in our lifetime.

Adam fixed my cloudy headlights on my car. Here is the before picture – they’ve been cleaned and taped off, but that’s it.

And here is the after – looks like new! I’m so glad he fixed this, it’s a huge improvement.

Adam and I did some landscaping this past weekend. We planted four Jasmine plants along our fence. I look forward to them taking over and smelling the yummy flowers next spring.

We replaced four loropetalum plants that had died in the front yard. We had the ruby variety before, but the plum variety does much better in full sun. Notice they have a more purple leaf.

Our gardenia bushes looked almost dead after the winter – here’s a before picture.

But, they got a second wind – look at it now! I doubt it will bloom this year, but I’m just happy it’s coming back so well.

My boss gave me a Japanese Plum tree (aka Loquat tree) that sprang up from a tree in his yard. So, we planted it in the back.

Here are some other plants. From right to left: Jeff & Sarah gave us green onions and a sweet potato plant, two orange trees, I found a volunteer oak tree and two maple trees in our yard and transplanted them to pots.

Our butterfly garden plants are doing wonderful – l love all the color.

We bought this sample stone that we are thinking of using for our walkway from the driveway to the front porch.

May 14th was the one year mark since losing our daughter, Hannah Abigail. We commemorated the day by planting some pretty flowers around her memory stone. It was sweet to remember her in this way.