How Does Mommy's Garden Grow???

When the weather is warming up around here - the pull of the yard and garden is tough to resist - so I save my indoor crafting for after dark or rainy days and get out in my garden as much as I can.

When we first purchased our house (which was built in 1929) the previous owner had been ill for some time and the yard and gardens had been neglected and overgrown. We looked at the house in April - in the snow - and moved in July - in the HOT HOT weather - neither of which were conducive to any kind of gardening.

I did not do much with the garden the first year - and waited until the following spring to see what would appear. I was delighted by banks and banks of my favorite Grape Hyacinth's all along the driveway, snowdrops along the back fence and a few daffodills here and there - but then suddenly the side yard grass ERUPTED into a huge bed of tulips, hyacinth and daffodills! What I thought was just poorly growing grass was actually a hidden treasure trove of spring goodies!

We have slowly turned that grassy area into a huge flower bed, adding mulch and year-round plantings, evicting the grass that still wants to grow there after all these years, and turning the side yard into a little oasis.

The bench (you can see just a corner of it in the left side of these 2 pictures) came from another estate sale - and even in the 2 years since the top picture was taken the garden has grown to embrace the bench, with a hydrangea on one side and a GORGEOUS bleeding heart on the other - and a tiny path through the forget-me-nots to reach the bench. The Munchkin and I like to sit there and fill the watering cans as he helps me tend to the new plantings and annuals.

Grass has given over to candy tuft, daisies, black eyed susans, glorious columbine and a few other goodies - surrounding a lilac tree that grew from a huge one that was on the property.

I am nostalgic with my plants - thinning seedlings is tough for me as I hate to see any of them go to waste - I love to get plants and seeds from friends and family and tend to label some of the big ones so I will always remember where they came from. Indoors I have a Christmas Cactus that is a cutting from one that has been in my mother's family for probably 50+ years, and when we bought the house the family left us Monnie's cactus to start our own history with. Some of the plants were cuttings from our house in Alfred, NY that went south with my parents in '88, and came back north to me to find a new place to put down roots.

Last night the Munchkin was helping me water the plants, sticking his nose deeply into the lilacs to smell them. The lilacs have a story, too - I am starting to tell these stories to the Munchkin, and hope he learns to love and tend his garden as much as his Mommy does. (that's me at about the same age he is now - I need to get a picture of him with his nose in the lilacs this year!)