My Half Acre of Paradise

This is the upper part of my backyard today, experimenting with a stitched-together panoramic shot.

I also took some other photos of things blooming or looking good in my garden. Too many pictures to comment on right now (it’s late at night!), so I’ll just add them all as a gallery below. What do you think? Do you have a favorite photo in this batch? Post a comment below; if you have questions about any particular photo, I’ll answer them in the comments.

I had a lot of catching up to do on weeding and stuff today:

• Weeded the veggie garden (I still need to create some kind of trellis for the green beans, which are only about 3″ tall so far)
• Weeded some flowerbeds
• Mowed the lawn
• Picked a bunch of cherries from our second tree which is much later than the first tree
• Picked a big bowl of raspberries
• Froze some of the berries and cherries for friends who are visiting next month
• Fertilized the flowerbeds and veggie areas with a 16-16-16 granular fertilizer
• Applied some Bayer Advanced 2-in-1 Systemic Rose Care fertilizer/pesticide to my simplicity rose hedge. The roses hardly bloomed at all last month, so I trimmed all the green “blind” growth down a bit and I’m trying to get them to bloom well as they grow back in the coming month. I didn’t give them enough extra water this spring to help them avoid aborting all those tiny rosebuds (see my earlier post about this).
• Tied the growing grape vines up on the sides of the backyard arbor
• Yesterday, I finished thinning the nectarines. I’m trying to be more aggressive than in past years to ensure bigger, sweeter fruit, but I’m a little late finishing it this year, so I don’t know how much good it will do.

I still have more to do this coming week, including fertilizing the lawn and spraying some pesticide on all the stinking grasshoppers out there! In the flowerbeds, I’ll use some Orthenex to give them systemic protection (kill those darn hoppers when they bite the plants), and in the areas around edible stuff, I’ll probably try Malathion. They’ve been eating the little bean plants a bit.

So, I can’t have a post without a photo, right? Here’s something cool. My friend Rich was visiting this week and decided to play with his Nikon on a slow shutter speed while cranking the zoom. This is actually a ‘Rocket’ Larkspur growing in my front flowerbed. Seems kind of rockety now, doesn’t it?

Little McKay finally decided to try raspberries (we’d been trying for a few days), and he LOVES them! Now, he says “I want some of that candy!” While we were out in the garden picking them, he said to my wife, “Will we have them with some ‘licious ‘nilla?” That’s delicious vanilla ice cream, if you didn’t get it. :) He’s so funny with what he remembers sometimes. We had talked about how good they are with ice cream on Sunday with some friends. So, yes, we did have them with some ‘licious ‘nilla, and they were awesome! I still think these raspberries on top of Breyer’s Extra Creamy Vanilla is the world’s most perfect food combination.

And here’s something I really laughed about yesterday — our twins actually found a good use for bindweed! I told them they could pick bindweed wreaths every day if they want to.