Positively In the Flower Garden

A Brick House

The sun was shining merrily and the birds were chirping enthusiastically championing me to get  outside to prepare my flower beds for the May days ahead.  We have so many trees on our acreage that hang onto their leaves in the fall like a kid and his candy, so we have learned to rake leaves in the spring.  The first year on our acreage, we raked our leaves in the fall, and ended up raking again in the spring, so a lesson was quickly learned.

After raking, I added coco mulch that I received for free from a nearby greenhouse.  They plant little seedlings in the bags of coco mulch, and when it is time to transplant the plants, they no longer want the bags of coco.  My mom and dad tried using them last year and they claim that the coco retains the moisture and keeps the weeds down!  So this year I thought I would give them a try.  Reusing is something I am a great fan of doing, so I helped out the greenhouse my taking the bags off of their hands,and hopefully my flower beds will benefit as well!  We fortunately were able to bring three truck loads home.  I have a lot of perennial  flower beds, and they are huge!

One reason I garden is I love to be outside with the birds and other natural wonders.  The flower garden also gives me something to photograph and draw!  Today, I was graced with the company of many winged temptresses that gave me a break from raking, and threw me into photography. I always have my camera when I work in my flower beds, you never know what may visit!

At times, there were five fluttering beauties at a time enjoying a mid-morning snack on last year's berries on one of our bushes.  Wings closed, the butterflies look like leaves.

This guy landed on my head for a brief second.  Lucky me!

This fellow let me touch his wing!

Beautiful Texture

Can you see the silver comma?

I think this brushfoot is called Comma, because of a silver comma mark on the underside.  Can you see it?

We also placed our patio furniture on our deck and in the front of the house.  Hopefully we didn't jinx the weather... often we put out our lawn furniture and it snows...so cross your fingers, toes, ears, nose hairs and eyes that the snow will be done spreading its blanket upon the prairie for this year!

After four truck loads of leaves to our back corral, where we compost them, we declared the end of our raking adventure.  I took a break at our dugout and spotted my first frog of the season and our resident muskrat.  Of course I had the wrong lens on my camera. Oh, well, there are still plenty of opportunities to photograph them.  However, I did take some shots of the gorgeous blue sky and "Toy  Story" clouds reflecting in the water.

Toy Story Clouds

After supper, I sat outside on the green grass and made time to finish a little drawing using my new pastel pencils.

Detail 1

Detail 2

Detail 3

All of this positively happened in my flower garden!