My new BFF!

This is Joshua! He is a Portugese Water Dog puppy and he is sooo cute! He belongs to one of the board members here at work. I got to puppy-sit him yesterday afternoon, fun fun!

Uh oh...

There appears to be a prankster on the loose in Jefferson!

Wildflowers

Today I found some beautiful wildflowers! A bunchberry, clintonia, goldthread, and starflowers!

So much for leaving early...

Today I decided I would like to leave early because I have a bad head cold... well as it turns out, I am being held hostage by state workers.
Just incase it isn't clear, in the picture below I Spy 2 workers operating heavy equipment and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 workers doing a good job of standing.

My new garden pets!

Here are my new hens & chicks... aren't they the cutest!

fanny pack

I found this fanny pack at my house today. Hopefully the next thing I find will be an 80's dance party so that I can show it off!

Spring Things

Introducing... Harvey! (thanks Chris for the name)

Harvey is a "boy froggy" windsock that I got as a free gift with a purchase I made for kids stuff with orientaltrading. He is not afraid to show off some skin and he also doesn't mind being outside 24/7 in his flower swim trunks and flip flops. I have suggested to my boss that we ditch the loon logo and adopt Harvey as our official mascot... I am still waiting for the go ahead on that one though. Sorry the picture isn't that great, Harvey's not so big on staying still for a photo.

The building that my office is in also houses 3 apartments... with some interesting tenants. By interesting I mean, a 3 year old that locked himself out of the 3rd floor apartment this winter, stands on the window sills naked, rides in the front seat of a car naked, and has been seen trying to crawl out the window of the building. By interesting, I also mean a young man who has some type of traumatic brain injury and likes to curl up in the road or the neighbors' lawns, build impromptu fire pits, and hitch-hike. And once more, by interesting I also mean this dog which actually looks like a teddy bear/ewok. In this picture, that little creature is standing on the window sill of the 2nd floor apartment and no, there is no screen in that window.

Alright now for the only real "spring thing", a beautiful flowering & leafing-out maple!!

New Gardens!

I have been a busy weekend-gardener these past two weeks, creating, digging out, planting, and mulching 2 new perennial gardens! At the top of our driveway on the left, before you would turn in to "park", there is an area that is all fill (very rocky fill, I found out) with random patches of grass, dandelions, daisies, and lupine. I wish I had some "before" shots to show the difference, but I don't, so hopefully you can tell the "before" by the landscape around the beds. Both of the new gardens are on a slope.

I made this garden last weekend- the majority of the rocks used for the border were in the soil... talk about fun digging. I dug it all out by hand, using my handy screwdriver to pry out rocks. I had already planted 2 sedum here last year, just kind of mixed in with the grass/weeds/etc., those are the the bottom and top plants. The 5 plants in the center are the newly planted ones: 2 stonecrops,snow-in-summer, sandwort, and an ice plant in the center.

This next garden I made today. This one was fun but A LOT of work... I basically completely dug out the side of the hill by hand (that means no shovel, just hands and screw driver), went searching around for flat rocks (there are plenty of rock piles along the edge of the pasture), and got some help carrying and moving a couple of large rocks (for example the one at the top- that is all one rock and it was very heavy). So, in this garden, I planted a white butterfly bush at the top, 3 purple salvias, 2 bright yellow-green stonecrop, 3 smaller yellow-flowering sedum, and then 3 lobelias (the annual kind) on either side. Oh yeah, Sasha made it into this picture too.

Here is a close up of this last garden, showing the great rock I found! My mom saw me carrying it and thought it was a board because of its great shape.

So here's what that slope area looks like now:

I still have some cleaning up to do (for example all of the rocks I dug out of the soil that didn't make the cut for the borders), but I think it looks pretty good so far!