T Stands for a Spring Garden Tour

Hi everyone. Happy Monday night or Tuesday to you. It's time for another T day already. Where is this month going to? Next week on T day it will already be May.

I hope you like reading about gardens because my T day post isn't very exciting if you don't.

Last week I didn't have anything on my calendar, and I was happy to have a week to get some early yard clean up done. I did a whole lot of raking. I also spread some  bark mulch.  I haven't finished all my gardening for the season because it is still too early to plant things, but I did  finish what I wanted to get done. And I beat the black flies 😀 that come out en masse and make it impossible to do much outside for a couple of weeks. 

Here's what the leave situation was before I raked, even though I do rake in the fall. This garden  actually fills with the most leaves since the winter wind blows them here and they get stuck up against the fence.

Here's my big perennial garden after I raked it. 

It's great to see daffodils in bloom and the other plants coming back up, even if most of them are still really small. It is still April after all, and our growing season hasn't really kicked in yet.

After I raked my rose garden I bark mulched it. I don't mulch most of my gardens, but weeding in the thorny roses is not fun, so I do everything I can to keep those weeds at bay. Maybe this fall we will get the back of the house painted as it really needs it. 

The angel winged dog statue is there because I planted many of the rose bushes in this garden on the day we lost our dog Harley back in 2014. I'm not a sit and grieve person, and I put that sadness into doing something useful. I will always think of Harley when I look at this garden though.

I take my husband's truck to the garden center and have them dumped mulch into it rather than buying it in bags. This year I had enough left over to do this garden too. I also put out my little cement bunnies. By the time the plants grow up you won't even notice the bark mulch here. 

 One of the gardens I am still trying to figure out (after a couple of seasons) is this small shade garden that separates the lawn from the woods behind it. I want it to fill in so it makes a natural fence. I haven't quite got the hang of that yet.

I enjoy a bit of cryptozoology, so last year I bought this garden statue we named Little Cheeks. Actually my daughter named him that because she said he had nice buns-which sadly you can't see in this photo. Once the plants shoot up some more he'll look less like a statue on a base.

This garden had a bit too much shade so one other thing I did last week was cut down some of the small saplings close behind it with a hand saw. I didn't cut any larger trees down, except one pine tree which wasn't even too large, but I had my husband take that one down with the chainsaw. Most of our land is wooded and will stay that way, but every few years you have to cut back a bit of it to keep the trees from overtaking the  open land.

And other than the veggie garden, this next photo shows my last flower garden. I hadn't raked this one when I took this photo, as all the leaves blow right through it. I did rake it afterwards and that helped to clean up some of the winter bird seed you can see on the ground.  This is my bee garden, my newest garden.   The only plants really coming up here right now are my alliums, but there are lots of other plants just popping out of the ground. Most of the plants in this garden are ones I separated or pulled out from overcrowding in other gardens. By summer it will look (I hope) like it just naturally grew there. At least it did that last summer. 

 By next T day my bees will either be in transit or will have arrived. 

Last Friday night I had a visitor to my yard that had the dogs going crazy. Mr. or Mrs. Bear was ambling through looking to see if my bird feeders were still out. I move my feeders closer to the house so it's easier to take them in and out; luckily I had taken them inside for the night. Mr. Bear wasn't moving very fast, and he didn't care about the barking dogs or us in the windows. Either he'd had a run in with the electric fence around the bees already or he remembered it because he didn't go near the beehives. Thank goodness for that because bears can rip your hives right apart going for any honey inside.  There's a lot of honey (like 40 pounds) in my hives from last season. I decided I'd leave it to give this year's bees a head start. 

I never got a photo of the bear this time since it was dark, and I was afraid Maddie was going to bust out the window, but here's an old photo I took maybe 15 years ago. You might have seen this before, but I thought I'd share it again in case you aren't really familiar with black bears and bird feeders.

And that was basically my last week.

Since I need a T day drink, let me share this sign I saw the other day. Those who follow me know that Pop's is one of my favorite places to get food in the summer. They board up the windows, take down the menu and close early September, and so when they open up, I know the good weather is almost here.

You can see the coca-cola signs and the bottom on the opening sign, and that's my drink for T day over at BLeubeard's and Elizabeth's blog .

And that's a long enough post for me. Have a great T day and week ahead.