Category: Yard

I woke up Friday morning to snow:

I want to say that’s the first time this fall I’ve seen snow on the ground here (the mountains have been white several times).

Of course, by the time I got home after work it was nearly all gone.

Well, maybe complete at any rate. I did another bit of retaining wall+gravel along the fence side of my center flowerbed. I’d put off doing that part because I figured I’d have to decide how to do the north end of the flowerbed before I could put it in, but instead I just put in about three-quarters of the width of the weed-block fabric worth of gravel. That means I really can’t do anymore without deciding if I’m extending the flowerbed or stopping it there. Maybe I’ll finish the house-side of that flowerbed next if the weather cooperates.

Before:

After:

A few weeks ago I bought a dozen more landscaping stones for my gravel retaining wall. Unfortunately I didn’t pay enough attention to the shape and they’re completely different (not nearly as rounded). They’re also a different color and a little shorter. I wish I knew where the original stones came from (they were put in by the people who replaced my fence – they did a good job on the fence, not so much holding the gravel back to make my yard level). Anyways, so long as the new stones work as well as the old ones when stacked 2-high it shouldn’t be a problem.

On a completely different note, I’ve got two more types of purple flowers blooming now:

I have no idea what either one is, but the smaller one has had buds for quite a while, just they didn’t open until the last couple weeks. The larger one has been blooming for a while, and it attracts some rather large bees. I tried for a picture of one, but it didn’t stick around when I started waving the camera nearby trying to line it up for a close picture.

These were not the target audience (there were three when I took the picture, but this was the one that didn’t react to me getting close with the camera):

After the wasps got in a fight with a bee I took the next opportunity I saw to take the hummingbird feeder down. It’s barely been drained at all the last couple weeks and I haven’t seen hummingbirds in a while. I don’t really see a need to attract stinging insects to my yard.

I was outside to put up a trellis for my rose vine to climb instead of wiring it to the fence. It was starting to reach over the top of the fence on one side and was so long it was draped nearly back down to the ground on the other side (when I didn’t hang that vine on something).

Before:

The vine was hanging from a couple screws that were left embedded in the fence by the previous owner. It didn’t really stay on them by itself, so I’d wired it to them. By this weekend that was starting to fail, largely because it had too many long pieces and I didn’t have very many screws to anchor it to.

With the trellis before the vine was arranged:

Trellis + vine:

Next time I mess with that vine that much I need to wear long sleeves and get some leather gloves. My partly fingerless gloves helped a great deal, but I still ended up with a number of scratches and had a few times where I was pretty well stuck to it. At least I didn’t quite give the rose vine a taste of blood: don’t really want it to get agressive or anything.