This past weekend, Eric put me to work helping him weed and do general clean-up duty around the yard. He only has a small window of work time with me because once the mosquitos get bad, I am inside for the rest of the season!

On Sunday, we tackled the brick patio that had slowly been shifting due to a tree root growing where it wasn’t supposed to.

I will cause you and your guests to trip and fall. Ha! Ha!

a super-highway system of roots under the patio

Of course, the root coverage was a lot more expansive than we had originally thought so a lot of bricks had to come out. But, the bonus was finding a ton of earthworms and transferring them to my raised bed. Another bonus was that we could do all the work in the shade during this time of year.

hooray for hatchets and other sharp garden tools

Eric put his focus on the difficult task of fixing a sunken part of the patio near the house and one section in front of the grill while I put the main part of the patio back together. It’s not perfectly even, but it looks way better than it did and we are no longer tripping on the bricks.

smooth and (mostly) flat

A very satisfying weekend despite my snarky post title. :)

In between rain showers we have spent the last three weekends digging and organizing all the plants we scored at the Raleigh Farmers Market and a local nursery. The deck box is full with the usual tomatoes and herbs and additionally, we are growing cucumbers, pumpkins and cantelope in the backyard. Plus, as a last ditch effort to have productive plants this year I am growing my bell and jalepeno peppers in the front yard near the street where there is plenty of sun! Eric has done a fantastic job of picking out plants that return year after year, so to supplement we added some zinnias, a lantana, straw flowers and climbing vines.

One challenge we did not count on was transplanting the japanese maple to the side garden once we discovered it had grown roots (big ones) into the brick patio. Eric had to cut the roots to free the plant, but it seems to like it’s new home in the back of the garden.

(Eric illustrating the size of the Japanese maple)

(the newly mulched garden)

The title of this post was going to be “cheeseburgers from heaven” when I had thought about writing it a few weeks ago. But it’s Mother’s Day today and the fact that I’ve been without mine for almost two years now hurts just a little more this weekend.

I had been thinking about my mom a lot one morning and on the way to drop off pup at the groomers, I turned on the radio instead of the usual CD. The next song played was “Cheeseburger in Paradise” by Jimmy Buffet, which I haven’t heard in years. I can’t say I like Jimmy Buffet all that much but I somehow know every single word from many of his popular songs thanks to my parents, specifically my mom. She always wanted to have a cheeseburger in a town called Paradise (there is one in Florida near I-75!) but we never made the detour on our many roadtrips together.

I found myself belting out the chorus with the windows open and just then, hearing that song at that moment, felt like a penny from heaven.

(Ryan, my dad, Lauren, me, and my mom in Oklahoma, probably 1984)

On a brighter note, I happen to be lucky enough to have three other women to celebrate this mother’s day—my gram, Tess, Eric’s mom, Susan, and my step-mom, Lynn. Having all of them in my life has made the loss more bearable.

Thank you all and Happy Mother’s Day.

On Sunday afternoon, after braving the BART ride back to the airport to pick up our rental car, we stopped off at Golden Gate Park to visit the Japanese Tea Garden and the SF Botanical Gardens.

Eric remembered enjoying the Tea Gardens when he was there as a child, so we made it a priority to make it back.

We were able to find free parking on the street instead of having to park in the deck, so the $4 per person entry fee didn’t bother me that much. What did bug me was that the gardens were very crowded (not their fault) and didn’t seem very well maintained (definitely their fault).

The structures are lovely, however, and when you did find a little quiet way from all the people it was a nice setting.

Across the street, the SF Botanical Gardens were overall more impressive in terms of peacefulness and sheer amount of flowers.

The gardens are divided into regions sharing similar climates to Northern California—Chile, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Easily a great way to spend an afternoon.

We saw lots of plants familiar to us from our trips to South Africa as well some new specimens, like this “big red” anigozanthos and marmalade bush.

It’s spring again and that means another year of trying to score an heirloom sungold tomato plant from Craig and Susan LeHoullier. We got started too late last Saturday and by the time we arrived at 11am, they were sold out. Since I didn’t feel like driving out to their house in North Raleigh during the week, I was determined to arrive early enough this morning.

Now, I get up every morning around 7am to take the dog out and give her breakfast. Then she crawls back into bed with me and snoozes for a few hours while I work on my laptop. This morning, however, we left right after breakfast.

This is how she looked on the way to Raleigh…

I think pup was missing her morning nap.

We pulled in at 8am sharp and I am happy to report that I am now the proud owner of a tiny sungold tomato plant. It joins the Tiger Tom heirloom variety that we purchased last week.

They may be little now, but look what happened last year. :)

(Did I really say that I would only buy one tomato plant this year? Whoops!)

In other garden-related news, we will not have to buy any herbs this year, as illustrated by this photo that Eric took this morning.

This is what the deck box looked like just a year ago.

Friday was beautiful here in NC- 80 degrees and sunny- so we headed over to the Duke Botanical Gardens in the afternoon. They have a number of raised beds filled with tulips in the spring and this year we seemed to visit right around their peak.

and irises too

The garden allows dogs so Riesling got to strut her new haircut (and pink bandanna) around the grounds.

As usual, she got a lot of smiles and comments from folks. She’s not used to heat yet so she was panting heavily; of course, this didn’t slow her down too much, though she did stretch out on the cool futon when she got home.

More pics can be seen on our flickr pages.

The recent rainfall along with the warm temperature has brought most everything in our garden to life over the last few weeks, and we are fully in mid-spring in Durham. Some photos from the garden:

Our daffodils started blooming in mid-February, and this is one of the last with a bloom. I’ll need to deadhead them next weekend.

A group of grape hyacinths in the front yard. This is the most prolific they’ve ever been, which is surprising considering the drought we’ve had.

These hyacinths have a great scent so we’ve been cutting some to bring inside.

With a little luck our dogwoods will be in bloom next week!

Even with the drought we still have a few plants that have provided us some color late into November. For example, we planted hardy cyclamen several years ago, and they send up flowers every fall.

These are really winter plants- after they’re done flowering they’ll send out their leaves which will stick around until April or so. We’ve also got some traditional fall color, especially from my Japanese maple:

Clearly happy in its container on the patio.

The biggest surprise is our gerbera daisy:

We haven’t had a gerbera flower in several months, but after we got some rain a few weeks ago, “Fred” came back to life and started blooming. With a bit of mulch the gerberas will come back next year. Hopefully we’ll have a better balance of sun and rain in the next growing season for Fred and all the others!

Because we live in the South, I was able to harvest some basil (for pesto!) and cherry tomatoes this afternoon. I freeze the pesto so we have plenty through the winter and I munch the tomatoes as a snack.

We haven’t hard a hard freeze yet, so I plan on making one more batch of pesto before Thanksgiving!

August was a very hot month with the most sustained heat I’ve ever experienced. Several weeks of 90°F+ days (many of them 100°F+), low humidity, and only one short thunderstorm in the past 7 weeks have lead to quite a drought, and our yard and garden are feeling the effects. I haven’t mowed the lawn since mid-July (since it isn’t growing) and most of our shrubs and small trees are drooping. Even the big trees are feeling it- below are the leaves from our big tulip poplar:

pre-cleanup and post-cleanup

Raking isn’t much fun to begin with, but raking in the summer is just plain wrong! We’re hoping for a break in this drought soon, but it will probably take something like a small tropical depression to make a dent at this point. Foo.