Flowers are here!

This week some of our big tomatoes started to bloom. The weather has been nice and warm, and the plants are loving it. The sprinkling system was turned on, and I spent two afternoons cleaning and replacing sprinkler heads and adjusting them. 

Our roses are looking good with all the blooms. My friend Camille got me a new rose called St Patrick that is a pale yellowish white, almost light lime green. It's one of the most gorgeous rose I have ever seen.

The chocolate rose is looking as good as ever, it's by far my favorite red rose. I first saw it about ten years ago, and fell in love with it.

This is one of my other red roses. 

Since I fixed the sprinklers, I also decided to reseed the back yard. We first seeded it last fall. It rained all week after it was seeded, and some of the seeds sort of floated away. This created  gaps in the grass. The dog hasn't helped either. In four to six weeks we will have a nice full lawn in the back yard.

One of the yellow nasturtiums we grew from seed has started to bloom. I also planted some moss rose, some more geraniums, and green bell peppers. Our Micro Toms that started blooming earlier in the spring are bearing fruit. They are slowly starting to turn orange. A few more days and we'll have home grown tomatoes!!!

The honey suckle that we planted last fall has lots of buds. The plant itself is very bushy, and I hope that it will start to grow lengthwise so we can get our ugly chain link fence covered this summer. Also in the news, our praying mantis cocoon has not hatched yet. I read that you can almost treat them as pets if you feed them bugs and ground meat. Two hundred pets would be a little too much for me, I think.

Kari was so excited about growing broccoli this year, that he overwatered them quite a bit. Two did not survive the drowning, but the bigger ones didn't seem to mind as much.

I have to brag a little here. Mikko learned to ride his bike without the training wheels! It took him one try to learn this. We tried to get Kari to do it too, but he is not interested at all. He has quite good balance, so he would learn, we think. He was pretty mad about the whole thing, so we left him alone to pout.

So this week has again been a good one in the garden, our grass is hopefully starting to sprout soon, and the kids are having fun as you can see. The god of all urban farmers is a keeper for sure.