A New Backyard Tour

Finn mentioned that they were now looking at the ugly brown that you get when the snow starts to melt. I remember living with snow and how dirty and yuck things looked as it started to melt and you were waiting for that green to show though.

So I thought I would give you another tour of the AZ backyard come March. We have had temps way above normal so things are really doing well. Our ugly brown is in July when everything looks scorched.

The citrus trees are in bloom. This means when you walk out the door, you get hit with the heavy,almost thick smell. At a distance, it is wonderful, get too close to the tree and it is way heavy and overwhelming. When we first moved here, there were a lot of orchards right in town and this time of year, you could smell citrus everywhere. Now most of those orchards are apartment complexes or strip malls.




Here are the Sweet 100 tomato plants we planted in the fall. They are still producing fast and furious. We are not sure how this is going to go as far as lasting as we have never been able to keep them going this long. The small amount of frost we get usually takes them out.



Here are the new tomato plants, the empty part of the bed is for my sunflowers. We are trying some full sized tomatoes to see if maybe the work the great white hunter has done on the beds will help us shade the plants when it gets hot. He spent a lot of time this winter building the wooden frame around the beds to hold shade cloth. We had PVC pipe frames but they were falling apart. PVC does hold up well in the sun.

I assured my great white hunter that if nothing else, his hard work makes it look like we know what we are doing. The key word in that sentence being "look".



This is the fun part of all this, our sunflower seeds planted and popping those green shoots out of the soil. To me, this is the true illustration of the "circle of life". I bought a couple of different varieties this year so we well see how it goes. Last year the flowers did not get near as big a heads as we have had in the past. Not sure if it was the seeds or the conditions........or the would be farmers that tended them.



This used to be the grand kids sand box. My great white hunter built it with the idea that it would become another raised bed. He took the cover off and most of the sand out, built the shade cloth frame and set up the water. The plants are cucumbers and summer squash.




This is what I see out the kitchen window when I wash the dishes. I am looking forward to the flowers growing longer and hanging down. Can't ask for a better view than that!




Hummmm, what is this? This is where Norma takes her handwork, her music and her ice tea to enjoy the afternoons and is the very best spot in the whole house. It was a Mother's Day gift about eight years ago. I have fond memories of giving both Julia and Colin their bottles while we rocked back and forth and enjoyed the fresh air. Now it is just Nana, enjoying the whole back yard.



Hope you all can dig in the dirt soon and plant the things that make you happy!