Today in Pictures

Wednesday and Thursday the temps were in the 80's. Today -- not so much. It was about 70°, cloudy and quite breezy this morning. I had originally planned to do some weeding down by the road, and then power wash the front porch, but instead Bill got the pressure washer out and I did the power washing first. These are the after pictures. You'll notice we have a large Jack in the Pulpit and a Fern growing through the front steps (as we do every year!). I'm all for letting wild flowers grow wherever they want.
This is a shot of the right side of the porch -- there's a swing and a park bench on this side, along with my porchrocker.

This is a shot of the left side -- only Bill's porchrocker on this side!

The view from the porch looking at Bill's garden across the drive. We have an abundance of trees and shade, so the garden goes where the sun is. In front of the garden next to the road is my flower bed -- with lots of hybrid lilies and perennials such as coneflowers, yellow yarrow, black-eyed susans and hollyhocks.

This is a view of this side of the driveway and one of the flower beds closer to the house -- this one has not been weeded yet! The beds next to the road and on this side of the drive have many different colors of daylilies, peonies from Bill's mother's house that I have transplanted twice and my fern peony.

This shot is of the center flower bed nearer the house. I did weed it today. It contains more daylilies, some resurrection lilies that will bloom in July, a clump of Virginia Bluebells that came from the original Talbott homestead in Polo, IL, where Bill's aunt lived, and some hostas, tulips, hyacinths and one of our hummingbird feeders. As I was planting impatiens in the back the other day, the hummingbird came to the feeder there and took a drink not a foot away from me. He looked at me as if to say, "hurry up with the flowers, lady"! And today I noticed he was checking out the petunias I planted in the hanging baskets on the front porch.

And finally, this is the big bed to the left of the front porch, standing on the porch looking out. I weeded part of it today after washing the porch. It has a ton of daffodils, which really spread out a lot this year, lots of different types of tulips, lots of different hostas and a host of annoying weeds -- including garlic mustard which has become quite invasive the past couple of years --- the woods are full of it. I made some progress on this bed, but the daffodil leaves are no where near dying back yet, so no hurry to finish this one.

I've spent three days working outside this week and decided that I'm going to relax and enjoy this holiday weekend. I may spend some time on the front porch reading and I hope to spend some time doing a little quilting.

I hope you enjoy your Memorial Day weekend doing whatever you like to do, also.