This was last year, but it will be like this again in about 2 weeks. I get lots of zinnias (thousands, I am sure) from about $10 worth of seeds. I plant them in 2 week intervals because they like it to be nice and hot to germinate and thrive. If we get a cool snap before they get going well they stay sort of puny all season, so I stagger the planting. The little house was my daughter’s play house made from old windows we tore out of a house we were renovating, and odds and ends of left over construction inventory. Now that she is grown and gone I store my garden equipment in there. I miss the tea party days, though.
polination.blog 
So pretty!! More please.
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Big ditto! :o)
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Just beautiful! And your garden shed is about 300% cuter than mine — mine is merely functional, and somewhat lacking in charm and personality. Last summer a family of groundhogs was living under the garden shed. Very cute, and also very destructive to landscaping and vegetation… but when I’m already dealing with herds of deer and gaggles of bunny rabbits and raccoons and squirrels and chipmunks and all the other marauders that populate our neck of the woods, one more family of large rodents one way or the other doesn’t make much difference! The local wildlife are the reason I do the majority of my flower gardening in containers on the deck and the porches, and in hanging baskets and window boxes.
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I battle the bunnies and the chipmunks and squirrels, too. I put out plastic snakes and move them around the plants and that seems to help. I have seen deer and raccoons and possums, but not often enough to cause a problem, thank goodness. You know I am a female contractor, right? I have never advertised in almost 25 years of business, but that shed has gotten me quite a few jobs! It was in a local magazine about 15 years ago, and I got quite a few referrals from that. I live on a sort of busy street, it is a cut-through for people trying to head to the nice suburbs from downtown, and also on the way out of the University of Richmond. People can see it from the road if they are stopped waiting for traffic at the intersection and many times they get out and ring the doorbell and ask me who built it, or if they can take photos. The same thing has happened with my screened porch. My daughter chose the colors for the play house when she was about 4. She wanted it to look like the little houses in the Caribbean. We had a book on Caribbean architecture that got her imagination going.
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Ting, you are so talented — you build houses, and you grow beautiful gardens — wish I had your talents!
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I think you have more talents than I, just different ones, maybe. The garden is my therapy. I take out my anger by pulling weeds!
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That is awesome! and inspirational! thanks for the tips on the zinnia planting… I’m horrible at keeping things alive so very specific instructions are always appreciated. I’m going to get a snake for my garden this weekend! Would love to see more pix
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What kind of snake, and why? Earthworms, I can see. Snakes? Not so much. My younger son, the 9-fingered herpetologist thanks to an angry rattlesnake, did not get his pathological snake attachment from ME!
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Haha – not a Real snake – a plastic one as mentioned above! I’m a big fan of earthworms tho – the real kind.
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*like*
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I’ve got lots of earthworms, although not quite as many since once of my grandchildren is mothering a baby bird and has been digging them up at mealtimes. On the plus side, I can tell where she’s weeded.
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ROFLLL … reminds me of the summer I found a spring peeper and decided to do a science project with the girls. We built him a terrarium and learned and observed.
We made the mistake of not putting him out in time to hibernate, so picture me, all winter, chasing down the odd fly that appeared with a fish net and oh so carefully putting it into the terrarium undamaged so Kawaii wouldn’t starve.
Kawaii means cute in Japanese … we had an exchange student that year. It’s pronounced kah WAH ee.
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Thank you for your kind words, MRM. I hope the snakes work for you – you have to move them about during the season lest the critters get wise!
There are more photos from my garden, and also from Bob and Chrissy on this site. If you look at the left hand side of the home page and scroll down to “File Folders” you will see one called “How does your garden grow.” If you click there it will take you to several posts with photos from our gardens. Enjoy!
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oh, thanks for the tip! I love garden photos!!
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MRM, your gravatar cracks me up. Baby Buzz has a similar tshirt, but his logo says Boobies. 🙂
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hah! that’s funny! ; )
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When my son was little, he really wanted a playhouse in the back yard, so my husband built one with stuff leftover from building our house. But wasps kept coming and building nests in it, and we couldn’t seem to get rid of them. We ended up giving the thing to some friends who needed another outbuilding for their hobby farm. My son also wanted a treehouse, and his dad built him one of those, too… but then the tree died and had to be cut down. Even after all of this, my son still grew up to do construction and carpentry for a living!
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A shed would be fun but we sort of need to see if the grass will grow in the back yard first! DH has transplanted grass from the front to the back.
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Grass is hard to grow, I think, particularly if you have a dog. My garden kept growing over the years as we gave up areas where the grass just never grew well and tried something else.
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Dogs and the neighbor’s lovely shade trees are the culprits. We are counting weeds as grass: at least they are green! 🙂
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I’m a big fan of the volunteers growing in our lawn areas. they stay green in August and attract all kinds of fun critters.
One “friend” once suggested we “do something” about all the dandelions. I asked her why on earth we’d want to “do” anything. They are really pretty when they’re in bloom. When they’re going to seed and looking their worst, they attract one of my favorite birds – goldfinches – who just love the seeds.
And the rest of the summer, they’re green and loaded with nutrition for the bunnies and wild turkeys etc. The elderly gentleman groundhog who has been quietly inhabiting his burrows under our shed for years really likes them and the plantain as well.
He had a wife and child one year, but apparently didn’t take to the whole family thing, cuz he never did again. He’s quiet, shy and never bothered my kids, so after one summer of wasted effort on my part to evict him, I decided to just go with enjoying him.
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My daughter adopts the wild animals as pets and even names them. She has tamed several of our resident chipmunks to the point of having them eating out of her hand. I’ll have to post some pictures of her feeding them.
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I am exuding jealousy at this very moment. I can’t wait until we settle somewhere that I can have the time to put together a fabulous garden. It’s challenging learning what grows best every time we move. Gardening is quite the stress reliever for me. I think my favorite thing is trimming the rose bushes.
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I love pruning! One of my favorite projects was reviving the old foundation plantings out front. I always admired bonsai, but they are WAY too much work. Still, I like the look, so I got a book and applied the pruning techniques to the bushes that came with the house. My Gold Star day was when a visitor said, “I like your bushes. They look like giant bonsai.” Yahoo!
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Okay, I’m going to attempt to post some photographs of my daughter in the act of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. We’ll see if I succeed.
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Wonderful pics. Love the dappled sun and the shine on Chip’s coat.
How’d you post pics in a comment? That’s so cool!
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It took me a lot of trial and error to figure it out! I’ll email you the procedure.
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