We're painting the roses red...and pink!!!

Everything is going splendidly! Seeds have come up and the roses are starting to bloom. This is my favorite time of year.

 These climbing roses are covered in blooms this year (at least, I think they're climbing roses. The send out long canes, so I just stick them in the trellis)

 My Cucumber/Summer Squash bed. Everything's growing great! I'm going to try and baby these this year and see if I actually get some good cucumbers this season.

 You can see my bottle reservoirs-LIFE SAVERS!!! especially in a Texas drought! They  help a lot during water restrictions too.

My melon patch! I know, it's a little crowded, but these past two years i've had a hard time getting them to survive even to a flowering stage. I'll just see which ones grow the strongest then thin them out.

 My FAILED corn patch. I could count the ones that actually sprouted on my hands. I planted when there wasn't rain in the weather forecast, and guess what happened? No rain! *facepalm* kicking myself for not being patient enough. I tried watering, but to water such a big patch by hand well takes more time than I have. :P

 New dwarf pomegranate tree!!! Excited! such beautiful flowers and delicious fruit. I don't know exactly if it's bad for there to already be fruit and flowers on the plant (like on a tomato plant before transplanting), but it seems to be doing okay. It's already planted, I'll post pictures later.

 My cilantro patch! Or now I should say, My flowerbed. The past several years that I tried to plant cilantro It never came up. Last year I got lucky and got one scraggly plant that went to seed quickly in the drought then sizzled. I was too lazy to pull it up and just left it there and this year, with all of the rain, I have TONS of cilantro growing EVERYWHERE!!! A very welcome weed :) In our house we use this in everything from salsa, to tacos and soup. We always have a bundle of cilantro in our fridge-up until now, that is.

 Cool shot that I got on a cloudy morning. Apparently, God had something important to say to one of the crows in the field :)

 I love Dandelions! Sooo pretty! You just have to take the time to look at them. Lots of people hate these weeds in their yard. I say, free landscaping!!! :) :P

 Pretty Pink Evening Primrose! Another under-appreciated, gorgeous wildflower.

 My sunflower border (needs thinning, I just didn't know how good the germination rate would be-2011 "Mammoth" saved seed)

 Butternut squash

 Peas on the tomato trellis (kind of late in Texas, especially since we've had an early, warm spring, but there's always hope of a few pods)

 The tomato trellis (you'll notice the small patches of darker brown around some of the plants in this blog post- I'm running out of mulch :P I'm just putting it where I really need it for now)

 Jalapeno plant-pruned off of those little tiny flower buds today to hopefully make them get a little bushier and stockier.

 I planted two of the tomato beds with carrots and forgot (somehow), planted them with other stuff, watered and had lots of little carrot plants come up :) Pleasant surprise, they should grow well with the tomatoes and onions planted there (supposedly good companion plants).

 Onions- doing well since I transplanted

My fiery roses (I don't know what breed they are, I just know that they're hybrids. I didn't even know that was an important thing to know when I planted them my first spring gardening :\ )

 Lots of lovely roses! I don't know what breed these are either, but they seem well suited to growing as climbing roses. They bloom like climbing roses- on growing tips. I figured that out last year when I only had a few blooms at the very ends of the canes and pruned accordingly.This year, I pruned off the tips to encourage side-shooting and now they're covered in blooms! I need to take some more pictures now that more have bloomed (I meant to write this blog post with these pictures last week- oops! :\ )

 Pretty Cilantro flowers! The look beautiful in a vase with roses!

 Our fig tree is growing like crazy! We might actually get some figs this year :)

 My ever-faithful rosemary bush! I planted this along with thyme, sage, mint, and lavender three years ago. The thyme and mint gave out their first year during a short drought, the sage succumbed to the frost the next year, and the lavender was killed in last year's bad drought. The rosemary has done beautifully in our dry Texas weather. Whenever I work outside I love how the wind blows the smell around :)

 I was just taking pictures of the cilantro flowers and found this little guy. Soo cute!

 Very helpful too! I read somewhere that they eat like 1,000 aphids a day! I've been finding their babies everywhere this spring. Keep 'em coming!

 Soo pretty

 A birds nest I found in our mulberry tree. It's right above the rope swing, though. I'll just have to tell the kids to be careful until I'm sure there aren't any eggs up there.

 More Roses!

 Well, If the pepper plants failed, at least the pots aren't going to waste. The lettuce is thriving in these even with all of this heat. We've had weather in the 80's for the past month and the lettuce below hasn't even shown signs of bolting!

My biggest tomato plant. Only 3'' tall. The picture makes it look a

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