Lots More to Come

   We have been talking about and studying up on the backyard chickens.  So, the new building project for my husband is the chicken coop.

   Our back porch is turning into a project porch. :D  Here's the view of the part of the lumber that's going to be turning into the frame of the chicken coop.  You can also see the bags of compost, a bag of vermiculite, and the 4th box frame for the summer veggies box.

 
   The view of the strawberry box this morning.  The plants have not suffered from the transplant shock, just a bit of trampling by the cats. ^^;  There are some tiny berries and more flowers.

   Along the fence are our newly planted raspberry plants.  This one is showing a lot of little white flowers.  Looks like one of the five I planted is completely dead, so I'll have to buy a replacement soon.  The remaining four are doing well.

 
   One of my favorite trees -- Russian Olive -- is loaded with flower buds.  I've been smelling the blossoms throughout the town, but our trees in the front yard have not started blooming yet.  We have so many of these trees in the area that for weeks in May, we can smell the wonderfully refreshing scent of their flowers.  They say these trees have a huge need for water and the city government lists them as 'pests' and call them 'undesirable'.  I love them though, for their cool silvery green foliage and the fragrance of the flowers.

   One of the peony bushes in the front yard, showing buds.  They are looking really lush this year.  I hope they have huge blooms.  Aside from the magenta colored ones, I also have white and pale pink.

Little Garden Fairies

   I was cleaning up my old abandoned garden plot at the end of our property late yesterday and stumbled upon my forgotten fairies!  They are small stick-in-the-soil resin statuettes I bought several years ago at probably Walmart garden center.  They were still looking charming, just placed in a corner of a garden and forgotten.

   So I washed them and placed them into my newly planted pots of pansy and dianthus.  The plants are still small, so the pots look bare.  It was the perfect spots for these little fairies.  Now that they're on the back porch just out the kitchen door, I can see them more often, too.

   And right next to these pots of pansy and dianthus is a large pot of nothing but 'volunteer' plants.  I have  red lettuce, a wild larkspur (It originally came from a seed packet of double-flower larkspur, but I keep getting the offspring seedlings that reverted to the natural, original form with smaller single flowers every spring... for 17 years now.), and a third generation cornflower/bachelor's buttons.  The volunteer plants always do extremely well.  They seem to know just when to come up only in the most favorable micro-climate area around the house.

      One of the new additions to our backyard this spring, aside from our SFG boxes, is the raspberry plants.  They were planted 2 to 3 weeks before my mostly-failed bare-root strawberries in early March.  They were hit a number of times by frost, and some lost more leaves than others.  We planted 5, and 4 seem to be recovering from all the setbacks/damages.  One at the end of the row, farthest away from the house, is looking dead with no sign of recovery.    I may have to replace that one. ^^;