Summer Garden

At the beginning of last week we found our first zucchini to eat. Boy was it delicious! At the end of the week we were looking forward for the first yellow squash to be ready to pick, but Charlie found it first. He becomes a vegetarian in the summer and grazes in our garden. His favorite last year was the cucumbers - but I don't think he has found them yet this summer. Last year we didn't get to eat a single cucumber because Charlie ate them all. Yesterday we did picked our first cucumber (of the last 2 summers) and put it in a salad for Sunday dinner.


This is what our small garden looks like now.

Trees (Finally)

Now that we have been in our house for 4 1/2 years we decided that planting trees was finally the priority. We have missed having shade and decided it was past time that we should have had some trees in. We ended up planting 10 trees this past spring.

The tree on the left is a Crimson Sentry Maple which is a columnar tree that is not supposed to get very wide. The other tree is a Snow Fountain Weeping Cherry.

We hope that this tree will be a great shade tree to give our patio shade. It is a Pacific Sunset Maple.

We planted a Flowering Pear in the East corner. We bought this tree at Costco, and when we pulled it out of the bucket to plant it, the bottom half of the dirt fell off because there were no roots there. Since this tree didn't start with a good root structure it hasn't done very well. We will have to wait and see if it makes it through the winter.

Another Crimson Sentry Maple on the East side of our back yard.

And another Crimson Sentry Maple on the West side of the front yard.

We planted 3 columnar Norway Maples in the front by the street. We bought the trees from 2 different nursery's and they are supposed to be the same tree, but they look different. I hope they look ok together when they are grown. The tree that is closest to the driveway we named LLLE (elly) after my mom. That is using her initials of Louise Larson Little. The middle tree is named Dru, (Drucilla Fenn Walker) after Ray's mom. We decided that these trees could look over our house like our mom's used to look out for us.

We got some really good tree food to give to the trees as we planted them, and to give them through out the summer. We also started giving it to the tree we have had for a couple of years (and has never seemed to start growing more), and that tree looks like it enjoys the food and has decided to start growing.

Our flowers are not doing as good as last year, but hopefully the petunias will start to grow. It has probably been too hot for them. We also didn't plant as many flowers this year because we spent a lot on the trees instead.

It will be nice to have trees growing in our yard. We will love the shade and it really makes the yard and home feel more inviting and friendly.