Happy Earth Day!

There always seems to be a bit of debate regarding the origins of this quote but it still remains one of my favorites & is such a simple but important message: “We don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors…we borrow it from our children.”

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend & are able to do something great for this third rock from the sun that we call home. We’ll be doing some gardening this weekend. 🙂

Every day is Earth Day!

Top Photo: Sand Beach at Acadia National Park in Maine. Bottom Photo: Lilacs ready to sprout at a local park this a.m.
Top Photo: Sand Beach at Acadia National Park in Maine. Bottom Photo: Magnolias on my nature walk this morning.

First Signs of Spring in Our Yard

The lovely flowers our daughter found in our yard this week.
The lovely flowers our daughter found in our yard this week.

We’ve started our annual spring clean-up in our yard — since I was home this last year, we’re ahead of the game a bit since we accomplished more during our autumn clean-up than other years. What a huge difference — it’s making things a lot easier so far.

Our backyard has a few ridiculously large silver maples & ours drop their leaves very late in the year. We’re usually losing leaves from mid-November to early-December and end up missing the last run of our neighborhood’s seasonal yard waste pick-up. (Plus, brrrrr….it’s cold raking leaves that time of year)! This last year we divided and transplanted a lot of our different varieties of hostas & several other plants. We used the late-season leaves as mulch in our larger beds to help our divided plants as they over-wintered in their new locations in our yard. So far it looks like everything survived and the broken down leaves will be great for our compost pile.

I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of our cocoa mulch that we used up toward our patio survived — we love using cocoa mulch. It’s pretty, it smells great and it really seems to work well to keep our weeds under control. Plus it’s nice that it’s a project I can tackle myself since the bags are a lot lighter than traditional bark mulch. We will need to buy more this year to top things off, but we won’t need as much as last year.

We had a few nice days this last week & our daughter has been really excited to check the yard each day to see which plants are emerging. Several of our perennials are starting to show signs of life and the early-season bulbs she helped us plant last fall are starting to sprout. We’ll update our progress as the gardening year unfolds, but for now, here are the first signs of spring we’ve seen in our yard.  🙂

Cornelian Cherry Dogwood - Cornus mas
Cornelian Cherry Dogwood – Cornus mas
A new bulb we planted this last year. The first flowers are dainty & lovely - can't wait to see what they look like in full bloom!
A new bulb we planted this last year. The first flowers that bloomed are dainty & lovely.
Our daughter found a few daffodils in our yard and liked that our Pachysandra ground cover is blooming. She picked these for me and they are a lovely combination!
Our daughter found daffodils & crocuses in our yard & also snipped off a section of our Pachysandra ground cover that is blooming. Such a pretty combination for our windowsill.

Happy Gardening!