We've been continuing with the Green Hour activities. This time, since the goal was to introduce some vocabulary, we did it over a couple of trips outside. The most recent was digging in the dirt to plant some flowers.
One of our words is "hose." Not terribly natural, I suppose, but still an important part of the yard! Monkey likes to help me water the plants and the compost, but he's a bit of a wild waterer!
Our next word is "grass." You may notice that my grass is a little bit out of control, and up to the Monkey's knees in some places. We're having troubles with our lawn mower. I'm sure the neighbors are thrilled. There are several - including our next door neighbor to the East - that have such beautiful yards! In my heart of hearts, I think that the cheerful dandelions and pretty little purple flowers (clover?) are a lovely addition to a huge green swath of grassy sameness.
I've got the gardening bug pretty bad this year (as usual), and I have to guard against both biting off more than I can chew and against spending more than I should. For instance, I received a petunia at church for Mother's Day, but one lonely petunia looks a bit out of place. I needed a bigger smorgasboard for my resident bunnies! So I headed off to the garden shop to get a few more annuals to grow next to the petunia. Of course, if it's at all like last year pretty soon I'll have petunia nubs which, after a time, will disappear all together. Courtesy of the local bunny population. So in addtion to a few more petunias, I got a couple of pansies, and some violas. Monkey helped me dig some of the holes here to put the plants in. The word was "plants" and the action was to hand me the plants, often faster than I could get ground ready for them!
While I was browsing the annuals, I noticed the perennial section of the garden shop, and I just took a "quick peek." Then I put back several items that somehow fell into my cart. And I bought the others. For instance, this columbine. I also got a pair of 4 inch creeping phlox with pretty little pink flowers, but I'm not at all happy with how those pictures turned out, so I'll have to try again. The nice thing about the phlox is that a friend of mine said that her mother-in-law helped her get her very beautiful flowers along the front walk going, and she took and divided the creeping phlox they bought so that it went a lot further for the money they spent on it. I felt almost frugal when I divided my two big phlox into five little phlox. They don't seem to mind the abuse, so I'm hoping that they start to "creep" here pretty soon as they're pretty small right now.
My tulips are a bit slow - they're planted on the north side of the house in very deep shade. But they're coming!
Other words we used while we were outside:
"flower"
"moon"
"grass"
"yard"
"pretty"
Check out the complete list of Green Hour "assignments" and the considerable resources that Barb has assembled on her blog to help folks get out and enjoy Nature!
2 comments:
Way too cute...I love your words. I too have to hold back from getting in over my head. I get so excited at the nursery and think that I need way more than I have spots for in the garden. I have learned to go for a specific spot like something to go in my shade garden or something for the veggie garden. Sigh.
I love long grass. :)
Thanks for the link, looking forward to your next post.
Barb-Harmony Art Mom
It doesn't help matters at all that I legitimately have a huge section of garden that is only growing weeds. We took out some big square bushes along the front of the house after we moved in, and it's taking some time to get plants put in there. The weeds are making themselves at home. So the new plants are exciting because they're new plants, but also because they're filling up part of the empty half of the flowerbeds in my yard.
I think that in my long grass I have a ground cover gone wild. I'm thinking very seriously about transplanting some of it into one of the flower beds. But I'm not sure how invasive it is. I wish that I knew how long it's been since the stuff went wild. It's all through the grass. But who knows how long it's taken to get that way.
I'll be by to check out the next activity. So far I'm really enjoying it!
Post a Comment