TGIF y'all!

This morning's yard-work cocktail resting comfortably on freshly cut grass

Yes, someone who only works at a real job two days per week can say "TGIF." I love Fridays because they are usually the day that I accomplish the bulk of my lawn care. This morning felt like a whiskey and ginger ale with a twist of lime kind of morning.

I realized this morning that all of the pictures that I've posted so far have been from my backyard. That's really the business end of the yard. The chickens, duck, crops, and most of our interesting plants are confined back there. Altogether, those elements give it an eccentric-hermit-out-in-the-boonies sort of ambiance. I try to keep the front of our house looking a little more traditionally respectable, nice enough to make the neighbors somewhat jealous but not overtly hostile for showing them up.

Our house. A very, very, very fine house.

My perennial & bulb flower bed, probably the most interesting aspect of our front yard, covers the former footprint of a rotten mimosa tree that was as close to being removed as one of these giant weeds of a tree can be. I still find baby mimosas, nearly four year later, shooting up all over this flower bed from some deep root that would require an oil well drilling rig to reach and remove. I add a little to this bed every year and it's slowly achieving the look I'm going for.

Astute readers have probably noticed that, although I called it a perennial & bulb bed, those brightly colored little flowers are moss roses, which are annuals. Fair enough. I experiment with various small annuals as a border for the bed. This spring it's moss roses, last year it was Dahlberg daisies.  The only perennial actually in bloom at the moment is that monster of a yellow echinacea on the left side. It dies back to the ground every winter but gets more enormous every spring. This is a native Texas echinacea, not the better known (and better looking) purple coneflower that most people think of when they hear "echinacea." Some of those are growing here too, but they haven't bloomed yet. 

It was all yellow

I caught this yellow bug with black spots crawling over an echinacea flower this morning. The yellow bug on a yellow flower is a little matchy-matchy but not all bugs can have the leaf-footed bug nymphs' eye for color coordinating. I'm not sure what this little guy is, but he clearly enjoyed sitting for photographs. I did everything but smash him between the lens and flower petal, and he just continued climbing over this one flower.

I'll leave you with a parting shot of one of our welcoming garden gnomes near the front door. He was given the name "UT Winklebottom" by Laura, close friend to The Nearly Constant Gardner, who has a special talent for doling out names that stick despite making anyone who says (or writes) the name extremely uncomfortable. Have a great weekend! You can sleep well because I assure you that if anything interesting happens in my garden, you'll be the first to know.

UT Winklebottom hitching up his pants amongst impatiens