Good Morning- Confusion reigns

I got up this morning and while I was walking the dog I noticed that the plants seem to be a little cofused as to what season this is.

I saw and photographed all these this morning:

Spring flowers

Cantaloupes ripening on the vine

Summer flowers

Fall leaves

Enjoy

♥♥♥Johnina♥♥♥

Got to walk the dog

I got my flu shot last Friday.  I know that since the shot does not contain the live virus that it is not supposed to cause any reaction or flu symptoms; it did with me.  every year when I get the shot; I get the symptoms.  They may be less then getting the actual flu, but they still make me feel cruddy.  Aches, chills, fever (100.6) and high blood sugar, (all signs of illness) but when you own a dog, no matter how you feel, the dog still needs to be walked.  Tom normally does this for me when I don't feel well, but he wasn't around, so we went for a walk. 

I decided since I was outside anyway I would bring my camera to catch the last of the summer color.  I have taught Rascal to hold still on command when we walk and that is what he is doing in the picture above.  Good dog! 

This is the space for my garden in the making.  This year we put up this hanging space for my tomatoes.  Put up hangers for my Nasturtiums and put a raised space underneath for my squash and cucumbers.  It is in the middle of this photo (click on picture to enlarge).  Eventually there will be other spaces with walkways and raised spaces, so I can garden in spite of my handicaps.  Little by little as we get the time, energy and money it will be added to.   Fortunately we live in the south where you can garden almost all year long.  Summer is actually the hardest time to garden here due to the heat, so more progress will be made now that the temperature has dropped.  Eventually there will be flowers, herbs, vegetables and a picnic table in this spot.

One last photo of the filterd sunshine in the woods across the street from me.  Rascal and I walk by it every day.

Hope you enjoyed my walk as much as I did.

Enjoy your day

♥☺♥Johnina♥☺♥

New Dazzler Blanketflower

I planted seeds for the blanketflowers from a package that was labeled as having assorted colors, but I never expected to get such a pretty pale yellow from it.

What a delightful surprise- I guess I'll just have to plant all the seeds to see what colors come up.

Enjoy

☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Welcome Home

This morning I went out and walked around the neighborhood and took pictures especially of the mailboxes and front door gardens. The things that welcome us home. While I was out one of my neighbors was sitting on his porch and came out to ask what I was doing. It is nice to live in a neighborhood where people still sit on their porches and care enough to question unusual behavior. It makes me feel safer.

I went out this morning at my husbands suggestion. He walks the dogs first thing in the morning and let me know even though it was warm at least the humidity was down. Amazingly I even felt good enough to go. After I did what needed to do in the garden I had to come back in and use the old ice packs, but that doesn't take away from the pleasure of my walk. It wasn't but a couple of weeks ago that due to the siezures that walk would have been impossible. It may not have a very long walk but it is longer than I have walked in a very long time. Progress-Hooray

ENJOY

☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Playing with my garden photos

It is so hot and muggy here now that even getting up early and playing in the dirt is very hot sweaty work.  Not something I tolerate very well so I do the minimun, only that which keeps the garden going, and will continue that  until the morning temperature starts to drop again.  In the meantime I am playing with my flower pictures and having fun with them.  I hope you enjoy them too and they cheer your heart.

Good Morning



Dazzler Blanket flower

Dazzler blanket flower



Balsam flower volunteer



Balsam flowe volunteer



ENJOY

☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Cheer up

I haven't felt good for a couple of days now so I decided to post some photos of my flower garden to cheer me up.  I hope you enjoy them too.

Blanketflower Dazzler

Black-eyed Susan



English Daisy, Purple Coneflower, Jack Benny Rose



Enjoy

☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Storms- Thunder and lightning



"In our lives there is bound to come some pain, surely as there are storms and falling rain; just believe that the one who holds the storms will bring the sun.”

~unknown~





Here in Georgia we frequently have evening summer storms complete with heavy rain, thunder and lightning.  Lately these typical summer storms have been happening every day or two and the last one took down this limb.  It wasn't until this morning when I went out to take pictures of the downed limb that I realized why the limb had broken off this healthy tree.

It was kind of obvious once I looked up the reason why; as you can see the tree was hit by lightning.  Wow was I impressed as this was just a typical summer storm.  Even though we heard the thunder and knew the lightning was close we had no idea how close.  This tree is the closest one to our house.

I took this picture from my kitchen window so you could get an idea of exactly how close the tree was to the house.  I would say that we were real lucky with this one.  We have had lightning strike the house and take out our phone wiring. It completely wiped out my surge protector and my computer; so now my computer gets unplugged and I stay off my land lines.  Please do not take for granted that a surge protector will always protect your computer from lightning; as I learned it can wipe out your surge protector making it useless.  Of course in part I did get an updated computer out of it eventually, which has been nice.

We were real lucky this time and our lawn and garden are thriving from all the rain so all these summer storms are not all bad and we have great sunshine during the day.

Enjoy the summer

☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Good morning from Georgia

My mimosa tree

I love my mimosa tree, it greets me every morning with it's delicate lacy leaves as I go out back to work on my veggie garden.  Unfortunely it grew up right next to our house and is quickly growing taller than our house so it has to go before it does any permanent damage.  Fortunely there are plenty of small ones that can be transplanted to wherever I would like one. I even dug a small one up an put it in a pot inside. I am in the process of deciding where in the yard I would like one; one of the fun parts of doing a garden is the planning and seeing the plan grow and develop. In more ways than one you can see it grow from the plans to the garden growing the way you want it.  Trees grow, flowers fill out and bloom, and veggies develop.  Right now I am working on a 5 year plan for my yard that includes trees, perrenials, edible plants and annuals.  Little by little my yard developes in beauty and I'm already looking forward to the fall planting especailly since I missed most of the spring planting due to my siezures, which have gotten much better and I now have hope to be able to do some of the things that I have been planning.  Hooray, hooray for me.
We are staying home this 4th of July and I am pleased that we can enjoy it here at home with our ever growing garden.
Enjoy your day
☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Garden Angel

Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, 'Grow, grow.'”

The Talmud quotes Enjoy ☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Greetings from my garden

Good Morning

 Enjoy your day

☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Early Spring Garden

 

An all new assortment of flowers from my garden.

Enjoy

☺☺☺Johnina ☺☺☺

Amazing

This blog is amazing for two reasons one is that it got done at all.  We've been having problems with either our modem or our router and my internet signal keeps getting dropped.  It has been almost impossible for me to upload or download a photo and I always add photos to my blog.  My computer acts funky if the signal gets dropped while downloading photos even if the post is on auto save and I have to start all over, but this time so far so good.

The second amazing thing is my winter garden.  My raised garden pictured above and photographed yesterday was frozen solid last week.  When we had our ice storm last week my garden being raised, filled with icy water than froze solid. The garden was full of snow and frozen water with only the tips of the leaves sticking up. When it thawed this is what it looked like.  Looks yummy doesn't it; and I thought that I had all the greens I was going to get out of there.

Most of these greens are cut and come again and so since this is my first winter garden; I now have hope of having greens till next May when they will die from the heat.  Amazing simply amazing.
Johnina ☺☺☺☺☺

Rainy days and Mondays....

....Always get me down.  I believe those are the words from a song from my teenage years sung by the Carpenters.  Although at the time I really liked the song it no longer applies.

I now love Mondays as the beginning of a new week full of opportunities.  I like to think that if I have messed up on meeting my goals or had a bad week that I can start over; kind of like a mini New Year.   Especially after a restful, uplifting Sunday like yesterday.  Benn came over and both Benn and Jeremy had their girlfriends with them and we all enjoyed visiting after a spiritual church meeting and just relaxing in each others company.  Wonderful, wonderful Sunday; I love the sweet spirit of Sundays.  After a day like that, I feel even more like I can start again and improve over the week before.

And rain, well without rain I wouldn't have my flowers.  You have seen many pictures of my flowers in my flower garden and even though it has had to be watered on occasion; without rain even that would not have been possible.  We have had many a drought year lately were water restrictions did not allow for watering of flower gardens.  One year we used bath water to water the flower garden, but this year we have had rain and at times bountiful flowers.  The cypress flowers pictured above are a good example.  These huge plants started out as two small seedlings this last spring.  They have climbed up a 6 foot trellis and are lush and thick and stick out about a foot and as you can see they are covered in flowers.
Johnina :^A

Mom's Day garden 2010

Happy

Mother's

Day

Every year my family plants a flower garden for me by the front door.  This year it got planted early and I have flowers blooming for Mother's Day.  Every time I come home and see my flowers blooming it makes my heart light.  It's a wonderful greeting upon coming home and always reminds me that my family loves me.

Silly dogs

Actually I think this post should be called poor Felicity. Even though she was not feeling well it was so hard not to laugh.  I got up the other morning and Tom had been working outside already and when I sat down to eat I noticed this red on the carpet and thought "sigh" that the good ol' red Georgia clay had been tracked in. It's a nuisance and hard to clean.  Then I realized that the color was not quite right and on looking closer noticed there was no dirt just red so I went in search of who was bleeding.  Found Felicity and she had broken a nail, BAD.  I stopped the bleeding and started cleaning the mess, called the vet get Jeremy up to help with her, she is over a hundred pounds and doesn't like getting in the car.  By the time we got to the vet she had taken off the bandages and completely chewed off the rest of the nail all the way off and into the paw.  It had to have hurt.  If I think about it to much it kind of makes me a tad ill.  But the vet fixed her up and put on one of those wonderful Victorian collars.  Poor Felicity didn't know what to do as it was wider than she was and when she tried to go down the hall or into a doorway she would hit something with that collar.  We had to help guide her around.  And when she finally settled down she was afraid of putting her head down, so she was laying down while holding up her head up.  I know it sounds like we should have pitied her and we did but it was still so funny to watch her.  And we laughed, quite often.  She did eventually get used to it and could relax and lay down and she healed real fast thanks to that collar so it was worth guiding the silly dog around.  I did make me think about how some times we laugh when things go wrong and need to show sympathy instead.  Why is that?  Think of how popular Funniest Home Videos is.  Personally I've never liked the show, but on the few occasions I've watched I have to admit I would sometimes laugh at some of the accidents.  What makes us do this?  I have no answer.

I have taken to having my camera with me even when I walk the dog in the morning.  The morning sun shining down through the trees is so pretty as I walk by the woods.  I was also feeling like I was missing shots of the birds and the squirrels; I'm still missing getting the photos of the little critters, but I am getting some real good shots of the lights and shadows in the woods.  Rascal is not so happy about it, judging from the look on his face.  Kind of like he's annoyed about having his morning constitutional interrupted.

On the way in he shows a rather peculiar infinity for my sunflowers.  I have to drag him past the pot and as you can see he occasionally chews on it as I get the door open.  I had no idea that sunflower was doggy catnip.  Silly dog.

Delightful Day

Today was a beautiful day.  Sunshiny bright, with a slight breeze.  I spent a lot of time outside working in the garden.  What joy it brought.  I planted tomatoes, saw tomato blossoms on tomatoes I had planted earlier.  Tomatoes have gotten sooo expensive that they have become quite the treat and I can hardly wait for my garden tomatoes to be ready to eat.  Of course no matter how how expensive tomatoes get they always taste so much better from the garden and I'm hoping for lots this summer.  Both my flower and veggie gardens seem to be taking off and doing magnificently this year.  I'm eating salads from my garden, my plants are thriving.  The picture above is an heirloom flower that I decided to try and they are blooming and thriving.
My Blanketflowers came up great this year.  I love them, they bloom from spring through several light frosts. They are always bright and cheerful and attract many kinds of insects.

T

This is my favorite.  My first rose off my new rose plants.  The Benn and Jeremy planted it a couple of weeks ago and it has certainly felt at home and thrived where it was planted.
My regular camera is back in the shop being fixed again so these pictures were taken with my old point and shoot.  I really feel lost without my camera, but I decided to try to make up for it by doing a nice pretty edit on the pics and I must say I really enjoyed it.

Garden Salad

This really is a garden salad from my garden.  I think it is appropriate to be able to get my first spring green salad during earth week.  I know there is a lot of political stuff to go with earth week but I feel this is the best way to celebrate earth week by enjoying the bounty provided by this wonderful earth by the help of my own hands.  This salad was grown organically and contains a couple of different kinds of leaf lettuce and mesclun, raddichio, arugula, strawberry spinach ( a new plant I grew from seed to try), spinach, Chinese cabbage, curly endive, garlic chives, parsley (much more nutritious than you would think), fennel leaves, edible flowers, and wild onions (that were growing wild in the yard).  I think it's pretty wonderful.  I cut my salad cut into strips; it's just so much easier for me to toss and eat that way.  Tip for cutting salad into strips: there is always stacking and cutting with a knife, but I've found that a PIZZA CUTTER works better and faster.  I've found with small items, herbs, edible flowers, and such that scissors work really well.  I like eating salads and enjoy them, but I think I enjoyed this one more than normal, probably because I grew it and harvested it and I think I could taste all the extra nutrition from all those yummy dark greens of spring.  Savor this season of new growth and bounty.    

Double Cabins Plantation

Since I take picture of the woman's activities at church and turn them into collages I decided to practice making collages and then get some opinions from my friends at MSS.  I thought that this old restored plantation would make a good subject for such a collage.  So I had some pictures that I had taken at the stop sign nearby and did one up and asked for opinions.  Oh boy! did I get opinions most of which were negative.  Now that I have received the comments and worked with them I can see that it really was pretty bad. I worked really hard to improve my collages by following their advice and the above collages are the results. When I decided to try again and I went back three times to get the house from different angles as it sits pretty far back off the road.  The last time I went there I had my camera set up for telescopic picture taking complete with my tripod. I parked at the end of the driveway by the county easement but who should come down the drive but four of the adults that lived there.  I was pretty intimadated.  They just wanted to know what I was doing and they turned out to be very nice people.  In fact they turned out to be a good representative of southern hospitality.  They invited me up to the house and allowed me free run of the outside of the house and the gardens.  They have peacocks which they let out so I could photograph them.  Pretty nice, huh?  All in all I now have about 150 photo of the place.  They took the time to talk with me and give me some of the history of the plantation and their current business which is a Bed & Breakfast and they also host weddings and other special occasions.  We also talked a lot about photography and painting and other artistic endeavors both on my part and on theirs.  They were very interesting and delightful people and I'm glad I had the opportunity to meet them.  One of those magical serendipity moments that have come about because of my interest in photography and the new courage I have developed because of it.

March goal- follow my bliss

Last months goals did not get done like I would have liked I didn't look up near enough of my friends blogs and websites.  I have not been posting in my blog like I would like; I keep getting distracted.  I decided that maybe I had to much structure in my goals for a while and my creative mind was rebelling so I decided to do more of following my bliss.  At first I thought that I was not getting near as much done but I came to realize I was actually getting as much done and more (in part because my health is improving).  I just was not getting the same things done.  Even though this is past the middle of the month for setting goals, they were in fact set at the beginning of the month just not blogged about, I have decided to put some structure back, more priorities.  I have missed doing my blog terribly and reading my friends blogs.  I need enough structure to make sure that there is enough structure so that the things that I have found recently and really love have a place in my life.

Let me tell you about some of the bliss that I have followed.  A couple of posts ago I was complaining about the Georgia winters and then discovering the wonderful intriquing shapes of the bare trees.  I started taking pictures of them and in looking at them I was reminded of Bonsai trees and started researching them.  Of course I need to be thrifty in going about this new hobby so i found out how to start my own trees from seeds and cuttings.  Of course this has to be done in the spring so I have been putting time into that so I wouldn't have to wait till next spring or struggle and not succeed because I was trying to do it in the wrong season.  See the photo above of cutting that is being rooted.

I've also been trying to capture some of trees and landscapes with lots of character because the trees are bare.  I put together this college of this old restored plantation house with it's trees with large pieces of bark missing from where the peacocks used to roast.

Of course being spring I've been working hard to get my gardens going.  This year almost everything I plant I will have started from seed (except the roses and azaelas) Most are already started and are ready to be planted or are planted or will be ready to be planted when they are supposed to be planted.  This is a first for me, both in growing from seed and having them ready on time, ironically this is due to my structured goals the last couple of months.  I have been frequenting the local garden centers, not to buy but to enjoy the flowers.

I was also asked to take picture at the birthday party for our women's society at church.  I took lots of pictures and edited 28 to make the collage.  I took the pictures on a Thursday and had the collage done the next Sunday.  Pretty impressive,huh?  

All in all this has bee a pretty enjoyable month so far, but I'm already starting to plan more goals but that is for another blog.