I was up by 7:30 on Sunday, started puttering around in the kitchen and cleaning it up, a never-ending task. Worked some more on the landscape quilt, finding out just why the stick iron comes with a guard around most of it (it gets really really hot) but it is still possible to get your finger on it and raise a big welt. Oweeeeee.

Made Spicy Sweet Bacon Chicken Breasts for lunch – of course I couldn’t find the recipe at the time so I just winged it. I made about double the recipe, we like these as leftovers. I used much less “spicy” since Ken doesn’t care for that. And I forgot about the garlic powder until I saw the recipe again, AFTER I had made it. So I printed that recipe out again and I intend to put it in my three-ring binder cook book so I can find it easily next time, hopefully before it gets buried somewhere.

After lunch I decided if I was going to work in the yard it was now or never. I have a bad habit of getting really excited about the garden early in the year and then losing interest in the middle of the summer when it gets really hot, so then the weeds get tall and I ignore them until the next spring. Ken went out too, to work on some grass that needed to be dug up and replaced. I pulled old weeds out, checked the peonies and Bleeding Hearts for signs of life (they are there, they are growing!) and moved some perennials out of the Weed Garden (future Rock Garden) into the bed south of the house. This bed is hard to deal with because it is the sunniest part of the yard, and it was mostly clay (I have been trying to work better soil into it) and not many plants do well there. Daylilies from the ranch do QUITE well there, but I don’t want a while line of daylilies, although it may come to that. Hollyhocks (one of my very favorites) also do OK in there, but some of them have spread to places I don’t want them to be, so I did some digging and moving of hollyhocks. The summer I need to label them as to what color they are and start trying to make sure I have the variety I want.

So I moved some of the big tall perennials (well, they are not big and tall yet but they will be) out of the Weed Garden and put them on the south side of the house, we will see how they do, the ones I moved there last summer didn’t do much but I don’t remember when I moved them. They came up again this year at least. And I am turning one of the tomato patches into another perennial bed, so I am going to move more hollyhocks and Weed Garden perennials there, but it needs to be tilled first, and Ken is going to do that next weekend. I watered all of the peonies and bleeding hearts. We need to slow down on the weed pulling until we get the accumulated weeds hauled off. We only get one container of “trash” picked up a week, so we need to meter the bags of yard waste out.

There are also a bunch of trees in the Weed Garden that I need to get out of there, they aren’t very fun to dig up. Some of the smaller ones I will dig up and maybe take up to the ranch to plant around some of the dams where the drought killed the trees off the last few years.

It was 72 degrees, just about right for working in the yard and not feeling too put upon.

I need to decide the purpose of the garden/flowers/yard. I don’t think it is to go out there and sit on chairs and enjoy the evening, because we don’t do that too much. We don’t have company often enough to show it off to. It isn’t really a big enough garden to grow enough vegetables to can or freeze to eat through the winter. I do enjoy growing lettuce and we have salads with that and eat it on sandwiches, but green beans haven’t been a big success and neither have tomatoes, two of my main gardening needs. Maybe I will switch the places I plant the green beans and the tomatoes this year, and try that.

The “new” perennial garden is going to have: hollyhocks, sunflowers (they aren’t perennials but I like them), poppies (which I need to go to SD and dig up or get seeds from, so they won’t be a big presence this year) and perennials (daisy type, brown-eyed Susan type) from the Weed Garden…..hmmmm……we’ll see what else happens.

I am also getting some “Red Hot Poker” flowers for that garden, I have tried them in other areas and they haven’t done well, but that might be just the spot. Hope springs eternal in the heart of the gardener.

The Russian Sage in the Weed Garden are still alive, amazing me, because they didn’t seem to like it very much there last year. It was more sunny than the shady flowerbeds in front of the house, but maybe too sunny. The Russian Sage may join the New Perennial garden.

Came back in to make Hamburger Pinwheels for dinner, but I think that is a whole ‘nother entry on its own.

MaryAnne took a break to lay on my new Faribault blanket that was supposed to be drying after I washed it.

What, this is not for me to lay on and look cute? What good is it then?

Aren’t I just too cute?

MaryAnne, later, airing out things, with Jello molds.

We tell her this isn’t ladylike, she doesn’t care…..