Therapeutic Thursday

Nice shot of our BIOTA sculpture at the southeast corner of the garden. This space transitions in to nice summer annuals and Hal and Doris R. do an awesome job maintaining this space. Hal was out there today hoeing up the early weeds between these tulip groupings. The pink tulips are errant but look vivid with the oranges! Great weather today going from overcast to nice and sunny very quickly. Last night we had another volunteer project that included dividing the remainder of our daylilies and organizing the daylily grouping for the upcoming plant sale. We had a great turnout (see to the left) and set up for inside division as we had some showers earlier and wanted to be productive inside. Janice and a dozen volunteers potted up another couple hundred divisions and we now have the daylily portion of the sale organized and layed out.

The Grumpies kept busy with various projects. Ron and Gary installed our new signs in to their holders and with the exception of two minor problems, the rest of the signs are in place for the weekend (see sample to the right). Ed and Larry went on a plant run while Maury did some running for us. The carpenters worked on another trash box and Bob came in and worked on "un-mulching" and area that we will compost soon. Dr. Yahr planted some small trees and had the guys install two small benches in the wishing well garden. Dick and Charlie hauled tables, recycling and the benches mentioned above. Overall, a great day as our water features are looking good, Larry finished the push mowing and we're looking pretty good for the weekend.

Our yard is starting to fill up with plants as we haul more flats back from our various suppliers (see below). The juggling trick is to accomodate the plant sale but also fit our stuff for the grounds. The local paper misprinted our plant sale as running from May 1 thru the 17 instead of May 15-17. Needless to say, we had plenty of people over here scoping out our plants for the grounds. It was tough to shoo people out and I understand why they were disappointed about the error. Oh well. We hope they'll come back for the sale. We'll start planting in earnest next week. I like to have most of our plants here before we start laying out beds. We don't always know what our "painting" will look like out in our flower beds but we certainly want all our "paint selections" available and ready to go (good analogy?). Nice shot at the very bottom of the Elf's Home spirea (Spiraea x cinerea 'Grefshiem') that has beautiful arching sprays of blooms and is one of the first spireas to bloom in our climate. Topping out at 5' tall, this bone hardy spirea is a real eyecatcher and has bloomed well for us every year.