Choice Morsels

Today's Pics: A fun colored Cosmos! It came from a selection of butterfly flower seed from Dollar Tree.    A nice shot of my ceramic cat under Hosta in my front container garden: I planted red Caladium for a bit of color amidst all the green. The secret to a large container garden is using quart size nursey type containers that you plant you feature plants in, then arrange inside the container on top of soil to the height you desire, then surround those containers with soil. Then in the soil in between you can plant annuls or whatever. In this case, I put Hosta in the soil between containers. It's a little over happy, despite thinning it out once already. If I want to plant a new featured plant, I just pull out the container, then put in back. Makes it easy.

 My first car was this: A baby blue 1978 Ford Pinto Hatchback, 4-speed standard transmission just like this. I bought it after I got out of the Air Force. It was 1980 and I was planning on going to college. I saw it for advertised for sale by an individual in the local paper. Price was great and it was in great condition. It got 45 miles to the galleon on the highway--which actually puts modern, lighter gasoline burning vehicles to shame, considering that blue body was all metal. Heavy, too--on a good downward hill in neutral it could coast 50-60 miles an hour flat out.  It took me to college the next years and was our primary vehicle after husband and I got married for another year or so. I looking back, I regret we didn't keep it after we bought a new car. It would've been smarter to have kept it. 

As the sun edges downward on the horizon, it's last rays strike the garden flowers beautifully! Native Daylilies   Red Salvia

  There's 2 Mama Kat prompts I can do today: one is, "a task I'd like someone else to take care of," and "things I'd like to add to my garden." #1) A task I'd like someone else to take care of: I decided I needed to hire a lawn/landscape company to do some of the big jobs in the front yard for me: giving the Pampas grass a good shave, hedging a huge Gardenia & 2 large Azalea shrubs plus generally weed-eat around walled & edged beds & walkways, etc. It's just too heavy a job for me to do alone anymore plus time consuming and just not fun when I can have a company do it all in one day! It's not just the hedging; it's also cleaning up & bagging that mess for yard-trash pickup! I do like mowing, but I don't like messing with weed-eaters and having that job done for me would give everything a tidy look. However, hiring a lawn/landscape company has proved challenging: The first guy never even showed up for his appointment to

  Today's Garden Pics: Beautiful Red Amaryllis: This is in a front container. Behind it is left over Cheers Daffodil greenery. Beside it in front, also red, is some Salvia. I have a bunch of red saliva in a container that self-seeds every year giving me lots of seed-babies to move around. You can see more in the garden background. Plus one of my garden art ceramic cats sits in the container. The bed inn the background is starting to look good--you can see all that bright yellow Gold Creeping Jenny! Nice Shot of a Purple Bachelor Button: I've never seen one before, but I know Bachelor Buttons come in a variety of colors including white, pink & the traditional blue. I believe blue is it's natural original color, which I like best, since I try to collect blue flowers in my garden. I was afraid my Plumbago, which is a blue flowering shrub, died in the Dec freeze--but, lo and behold, I it's putting up fresh growth!

Garden Pics this week: Nice shot of sunny Purple Shamrocks: Because they get more sun, these have green patches, but it gives them a nice look! They remain darker purple in full shade.   Daylilies are Blooming! These are a hybrid Daylily, which means they've been bred for a particular color. These aree a bi-color with 3 petals of one color and 3 of another shade. I call them "Melba" for their color, which is a pinkish-orange.  I bought them from a retired guy down the road who had a who huge garden of Hybrid Daylilies of every sort of color that he'd offer for sale every May, to thin them out. He sold me these particular ones for $2.00.  It's a very large Daylily with very tall greenery that's very hardy and prolific. I've separated it & moved clumps of it all sorts of places in various beds. Best $2 I ever spent!