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. :)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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

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.