Over on one of my new favorite blogs, May Dreams Gardens, there’s a recurring feature that takes place on the 15th of every month called Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, where bloggers from around the world share photos of what’s been blooming in their gardens.

Even though I’m not exclusively a garden blogger, working on prettifying our ugly yard has been a major theme here on this blog lately (and also, have I mentioned that I’ve been bitten by the gardening bug? I don’t know what happened, but since the start of spring I’ve been completely obsessed!) So for today’s post, I thought it would be fun to join in the Bloom Day festivities with a tour of what’s been blooming around our yard.

First, in the front yard, those hyacinths we planted way back in the fall of 2011 came back again:

I love how full this one shown in the above photo is. Just a big explosion of blossoms. And the deep pink color with white edges kind of reminds me of a peppermint.

We had another hyacinth in front, a purple one, but it’s not nearly as full looking:

The hyacinth in the above photo is actually the same one that could be seen sprouting in the photos shown in this post, and was one of the first hints of green to pop up in our yard this spring.

At the same time we planted those hyacinths, we also planted a bunch of tulip bulbs, and last spring we had a great variety of tulips come in. There were pink ones, and orange ones, and purple ones, and fancy double tulips, and tulips with fringed edges. (You can see a bunch of them blooming in this post from last year.) But this spring, for some reason only the orange ones came back:

I’m not sure why it happened this way, and it was a complete accident, though I guess it gives the impression that we planted all the same kind on purpose!

Moving around to the backyard, we had a bunch of bluebells come up:

We didn’t plant these (they’re from the previous owner) and they just sprang up all over our yard like weeds, mixed in with the grass, to the point where some of them ended up getting mowed. (Boo.) Upon trying to look it up, these would seem to be Grape Hyacinths or Muscari (Wikipedia article here).

Here’s a closer view of one of the grape-like clusters of blossoms:

And finally, I figured I’d include a photo of one of those surprise double daffodils that came up in the backyard, even though I already mentioned them in a previous post:

I think the double daffodil in the above photo is probably my favorite of all the blooms shown in this post.

And that concludes the tour of everything that’s been blooming in our yard so far this year! I know it’s not a very long list, and the gardening bug in my head is saying, “plant some more stuff so you can have even more blooms next spring!” Haha. It’s an obsession, I tell you.

What about you guys — anything interesting blooming in your yard and/or garden lately? Does anyone have any guesses as to why only the orange tulips came back? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments!

When I last left off blogging about our backyard progress, we had just discovered a huge colony of ants living in one of the window boxes on the garage (read all about that here) and subsequently removed the window boxes because they were very old and rotten. We were left with this unsightly view, with discolored patches where the window boxes used to be:

Those spaces that had previously been covered by the window boxes were ten kinds of ugly — peeling paint, dirt, spider nests. The one on the right looked like it wasn’t even painted at all behind that flower box. So the first step was to give it a good hosing down, and then touch up those areas with some exterior paint. Here is the much-improved view after painting those problem spots as well as the existing brackets for holding the window boxes:

Looking better already! The new paint’s shade of white may have been a tiny bit off from what was already on the garage (we just picked up a random quart of white exterior paint) but once it dried any differences were barely noticeable.

For the new window boxes, we decided to go with these ready-made ones from Home Depot:

36-inch window box, available from Home Depot as seen here.

They’re roughly the same length as the old flower boxes were, but a little shorter and narrower, and with straight sides rather than the slanty front the old window boxes had.

Also, even though the old ones just had the dirt piled right inside the wood, we also decided to pick up a couple of plastic liners to hopefully protect the wood of these new ones a little better:

The budget breakdown for the two new wooden window boxes with liners went something like this:

• 36-inch Wood Window Box x 2 @ $24.98 each = $49.96
• 36-inch Black Plastic Window Box Liner x 2 @ $8.98 each = $17.96
• Total: $67.92

Not too bad, I don’t think — I doubt we could have built anything this nice ourselves in any reasonable amount of time, or for significantly less money. Plus the instant gratification was nice. For “installing” them, we just plopped them down on the old brackets like so:

As the above photo shows, they’re a little narrower than the old window boxes were, and the brackets stick out an inch or two past the edge. I’m tempted to try to go back and trim them down with a hacksaw or something, though it’s a pretty minor thing and I haven’t done anything about it yet.

For now, they’re just plopped down there on the brackets. One of the two old window boxes (the non-ant-filled one) wasn’t attached either, and was fine just sitting there on the bracket for years — the only concern now might be that a certain toddler will yank them down and get hurt. For that reason, I think I’ll attempt to attach them more securely this weekend if possible.

Anyway, moving on, here’s a view of what the garage looks like now, with the new window boxes:

The natural wood color is definitely a lot different than the painted red — but overall these sleek new window boxes are a huge improvement over the rotting, sagging things we had before. (Check out this post for a refresher on what it all looked like when we started — we’ve come a long way already!)

So that concludes Chapter Two in the garage window box saga. Stay tuned for the final installment, the fun one where we actually put flowers in these things, to be posted in the next few days!

In the meantime, I’m curious to hear any feedback on the new window boxes, especially regarding the color/finish. Do you think these “go” with the garage and its roof color and such, or do you think the painted red ones were a better fit? Any thoughts or opinions would be appreciated in the comments!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been making some more progress on the backyard — specifically this one little area right by the stairs leading up to the back door, which the previous owners had had bordered off as sort of a flowerbed area.

Somehow, I seem to have missed getting a good straight-on “before” photo of this area (in the state of the backyard post, it got partially cut off in all the photos) but here’s a slightly off-center view:

As the above photo shows, we had a very overgrown-looking area with a gigantic tumbleweed-looking thing. In previous summers, the tumbleweed thing has greened up into a lovely plant with yellow flowers (you can see it blooming in this post) but it was just getting too big and overgrown, so I trimmed it down some. I may have gone overboard — Joe thinks I killed it, and I worry that he might be right, but I suppose time will tell.

There were a few other issues to be addressed in this little area of the yard, like for instance, this zig-zaggy metal border on the edge along the sidewalk:

It was old and crooked and not really the style we wanted, so I pried it out. I was surprised at how one part of it had actually gotten sunken under a good chunk of the lawn, which ripped out when I removed the border:

It was easy enough to put the chunk of grass back, though.

So with the tumbleweed bush trimmed and the zig-zag metal border removed, this next photo shows what we were working with (for orientation purposes, the stairs up to the back door would be just beyond the top of this photo):

The front of this area had a piece of very old, very rotten wood as a border, so I scooped that up and removed it. And with both of those old mismatched borders gone, it was just a matter of pulling out various weeds and roots, and then loosening up the soil in preparation to plant some new stuff there.

The fun thing is, Lillian actually kind of helped with this part!

Since that particular trowel was really rounded and blunt, we didn’t have any misgivings about letting her dig with it, and by all accounts she had a blast shoveling up dirt and grabbing fistfuls of it just for fun. (Working theory: “playing in the dirt” and “doing what the grown-ups are doing” are a toddler’s two favorite things, and an added bonus if you can do them both at once!) Adorably, she also started saying the word “dirt” for the first time during this exercise, pronouncing it “diwt.”

After all the weeding was done and the soil had been loosened into fluffy perfection, this was what the flower bed area looked like:

A huge improvement from that overgrown mess we started with, right? We still need to put down some mulch, and add some more flowers and such, and hopefully that bush will come back in spite of the severe trimming it got. And the stairs up to the back door could use a bit of work, while I’m listing things off. But at least progress is starting to happen in the backyard.

Oh, and as an added bonus, over on the right side of the photo you can see our daffodils in full bloom:

We first caught a glimpse of these guys back in this post, when they were first sprouting up in a very very overgrown flower bed. What I didn’t know then was that they’re not ordinary daffodils, but actually double daffodils — “the show-offs of the daffodil world” according to Better Homes and Gardens. So they look like daffodils, just much fuller and fluffier:

It was a happy little surprise — especially considering that we somehow didn’t notice these last spring, which was our first spring living in this house.

Anyway, that’s the story of the progress we’ve been making on one small area of the yard so far, and we’ve been slowly trying to stab away at other areas as well — some of which haven’t gone quite as smoothly. Like this past weekend, I thought I’d try to do a little casual work on one of the garage’s window boxes, and it turned into sort of a traumatizing, curl up in a fetal position muttering “I don’t wanna talk about it” ordeal. Sorry for that cryptic bit of suspense, there’ll be a post coming soon with the whole story about that.

In the meantime, have you guys been doing any interesting gardening (or tumbleweed-bush-murdering) lately? What would you plant in this newly cleared flowerbed area? Feel free to share any stories or ideas in the comments!