Garden/Life Journal

I planted some new additions to our very bare terrace garden this weekend - orange yellow tea rose and couple of strawberries, pink bleeding heart, columbines, dianthus and ground covering blue and white blooming little patches.


This part of garden is very shady (only 2 hrs of sun at closest-to-the-house spots) and moreover the soil there is bare clay (I try to improve that with bags and bags of compost every year), it was quite difficult to find anything which would tolerate such bad conditions - so far, the survivors include only the hellebore, astilbes, hostas and ferns (and there is as well rose, yarrow and sedum in the sunny corners), well we shall see how successful I was this time. These are leftovers of cheerful orange tulips, big white lilies (bloom time in June) and white clematis living in the happier sunny backyard corner.


And of course I got too inpatient to wait for tomatoes seedlings to grow so I got two little of Big Girl(s) early fruiting variety,


just in case the seeds never start (shall the frost come again, I will make small plastic greenhouses around them). Than, just because I had no more space anywhere else, I made a new row for gladiolas and shady flowery mix


I got it in WHF, even though these mixes never quite grew for me before, but I remain an optimist, the new place is nice flat spot with good soil). On the "house" end of it, there are the peonies; I thought they died, but they surprised me and came back, even the red one I planted from bulb last spring and which never even sprouted. I got the other one, the whitish pink one, in the pot late last summer and than it got some white mold all over and leaves died out. I love peonies, my grandma used to have big pink bushes in her garden, I can still remember the nice smell ... The white one is ready to bloom soon.

The new flower bed mirrors the tulip stripe on the other side of front yard; to replace the spring bulbs, I sewed in the sunny summer flowers mix (from the same source as the one above) and poked in some ranunculus here and there, may be I will add gladiolas too, just to keep the symmetry going :).


Our little cherry is all blooms this year (planted in February 2009). I am curious how many cherries will birds actually leave for us (last year we shared with W. literally just 1 fruit).


I am ready to cover it with the net if I see them wingy creatures getting too close to it :)

We had some in the seventies-eighties warm evenings recently, I just love to sit in the front porch after the dusk, with glass of wine, with the neighborhood quieted down, with only the birdies chirping the love songs, and imagine how beautiful it all will be six weeks from now,:)

Oh, and on Friday I had amazing opportunity to see DC from, at least for me, very unusual perspective, we had small grilling party with my office friends at one of the Pentagon city roof tops right above the famous shopping mall. And I think I found where did they got the NCIS opening picture from (before the collage that is).



. . .
A tragedy happened on Saturday, polish president and 95 other people died in the plane crash on the way to the peace making ceremony in Katyn. I do not know anything about politics in Poland, but I can imagine what would be the reaction of Czechs if something like that happened to us (well, omitting the basic human feeling of sadness for the lost lives of course). Hm, it is somehow strange it happened there, of all places, like the insurance that past shall never be forgotten ...