Ode to June

Mother Nature's being very kind this summer. (She better not make me regret those words.) We're having incredible weather today, which makes it hard to sit at the computer and write.

The flower garden is flourishing! At least, one of them is. The bees and butterflies just love it. I do, too.
I've picked two gallons of wild blackberries this week. And that doesn't count the ones Baxter and I have eaten -- fresh off the vine. Or bush or whatever -- the sharp, sharp, magnetic briar bush to be more specific. Yes, Baxter loves, loves blackberries. He's even taught his brother how to nibble them ever-so-carefully off the bush.

Goodbye, June!

Summer is in the air!

I've been home for more than a month, and it is time, once again, to hit the road! North, east, west, south.... I'm literally going in all four directions.

And am I ever going to rack up the miles.

I just made the mistake of adding up miles on Mapquest. Let's just say I will tally nearly 5,000 miles on the road over the next month.

Yeah. My tailbone hurts just from thinking about it. Which reminds me, I need to get a pillow for that.

But before I can take off, I have one last commitment here in Missouri. I'm not sharing details until after the fact, but let's just say it has a taste of "Sweet Home Alabama" to it.

The blog will continue from the road -- in-between my freelance writing. I admit I've slacked on blogging lately, but why write for free when I can get paid for it?

Writer's Cramp & Green Thumb

It's been another busy week, and it might look like I'm slacking off on the writing. But I'm not! I have a deadline approaching for the magazine, and have picked up some freelance writing for a few web sites. I'm excited. We'll see how it goes -- I have to get through writing a couple "newbie" articles first.


You'd think that planting dozens of flats of begonias and other plants would make me not want to tend to my own flowerbeds at home. Wrong. On my day off, I popped into a local greenhouse to get some color for my whiskey barrel and patio. I couldn't help it. I had to.

Purple and pink is the theme this year. Big surprise, right?

I got ambitious, trying a few new things for hanging baskets and patio containers this year. Joyce gave me a herd of clay pots for my birthday, and I'm working to fill them up and put them on the patio. It's starting to look really cool out there. More shots will come once stuff starts to bloom. So far, the new things I've planted are some dahlia bulbs, a Sun Patiens (impatiens for the sun...gorgeous but doesn't look anything like an impatiens), a basket of gypsophila, silver falls dichondra and an ivy geranium, and some vinca. I might have gone a little overboard?

The flowerbeds are pretty low-maintenance. This year, I've tried to "weed out" the morning glories and four o'clock mix, because they literally choke out the rest of the garden (I barely saved my Clematis from the morning glory last summer). I've planted some simple wildflower mix seeds in various spots, plus the zinnia standby. The coneflowers are doing really well, spreading throughout the front bed. I can't wait for everything to bloom -- it's a riot of color.

I have a touch of my grandma in my garden. There are a few hollyhocks growing in the west bed -- cultivated by seeds taken from her hollyhocks on the edge of Heron Lake. And then I'm babying along a Jackmanii Clematis. She had a fabulous, huge purple clematis at the Heron Lake house that I loved. I hope mine looks as nice as hers someday.

Can't wait for summer!