In years gone by...

Hey everyone! I'm just sitting here with spring fever on an unusually warm day yearning to be outside planting, but know I should wait until at least the LFD. I thought I'd put up some pictures of the past couple of years with my garden and tell you a little about them while I wait. They're what I've tried, what's succeeded, what's failed. Here they are...

This is my 2010 garden from a window on the second floor of the house. I think this was taken in early June

This is my garden in early April. I just wanted to show the layout. This was the year I went for the "french cottage garden" which emphasizes on beauty as well as productivity. - I just basically doodled some shapes I thought were pretty and molded my garden to them :)

The pretty side of my garden--the front. This doesn't show the right side of it though which had my pretty nasturtiums peeking in the corner.

And.....the failure side of the garden. Sort of. The squash on the left succumbed to the heat, the pepper and onions in the middle were wimps and got taken over by bermuda grass, but the green beans on the right were AWESOME and kept on giving late into the summer. -Taken in May

My garden after the corn got knocked out by a rainstorm and I had to pull it all out :( you can see that the sunflowers look a little floppy and everything else has gone wild with the rain. This was taken only a few days after the picture at the top. I was VERY disappointed.

My garden after a VERY RARE snow in February!

My garden Spring 2011, March to be exact. You can see those bottle reservoirs I was talking about. Best. Discovery. Ever! I use them every year. They also make fertilizing a whole lot easier.

Getting off to a good start-Early April

 My ever-faithful green beans :) and a towering sunflower-May

 The sunflowers continue to grow taller and taller-May

 Sunflowers full bloom! Aren't they beautiful? -June

 What goes up, must come down. My corn patch after the horrible drought and attack of the cucumber beetles. -Sept

My poor little fall cucumber patch. -September

My humongous tomato plant! one of the only survivors-Sept

I got rid of my compost bin this year. Not working out with so little rain.

 My pretty climbing roses. Actually, I didn't realize they were climbers until just a couple of years ago. (I didn't pay attention to names when I first started them). They started shooting canes everywhere and I finally realized what they were. That spring I dug them up gently and planted them closer to the trellis. They have recovered beautifully and sent out more roses last spring than ever before.

 My Asiatic Lily that is faithful in coming up year after year (so far). It wasn't able to bloom last year because of the drought. This picture is of two years ago.

 This leaf grew like crazy. It grew to almost triple the size of all the other leaves as you can see below.

 I don't have very big hands, but this leaf got up to almost 8 inches long!

 Fuzzy, my constant companion in the garden. The sweetest cat that you could ever meet. Sadly, she disappeared a couple of months ago and hasn't come back :'( .

 My poor little sunflower house that struggled through the drought (you can see the hose snaking through there).

 Me next to my beautiful sunflowers

 Such nasty weeds, but such pretty colors, I had to take a picture.

 A fig leaf scorched by drought, beautiful.

 Crepe myrtles <3

 The pretty, subtle lilac color in these tiny flowers didn't show up as much as I wanted it to against the Mexican petunias.

 Interesting shot of a bunch of oregano seeds.

 These roses have such a fiery color. I love them!

 Not the nicest insect to have in the garden after its eggs hatch, but I still think it's pretty.

My third generation zinnia that has bred true year after year.

 Gorgeous mahogany sunflowers from my fall mix (second generation).

 Mammoth sunflower at 11' (it kept growing though) also from saved seed

 Beautiful sweet peas.

Lilac, one of my favorite colors

Beautiful sunflowers

A day's picking. These are Burpee's "Tenderpick". It doesn't say so on the packet or anything, but they have great heat resistance out here where I live and it gets into the 100's sometimes in mid-June!

36 pictures! Wow I've got it BAD. Well, that's it (for now at least). Thanks for bearing with me as I try and resist going out planting. I'll probably be back here soon :)
        ~Mara