My Spring Flowers

snapdragons '11, originally uploaded by Bumble Lush.

Spring has been beautiful in the DC area so far. Last year it seemed that we jumped from winter straight to summer with no transition whatsoever, but Mother Nature is making up for it this year. The past few weeks have been mostly rainy, but I like spring showers, and the rain is helping my plants. The few sunny days we’ve had have been warm and felt good on my skin.

I mainly grow vegetables, but in my front yard I have flowers.

I planted petunias and snapdragons in the pots in the front yard this year. For the last two years I had peppermint in the pot where the petunias are now. The pot sits on the dividing line between my driveway and my neighbor. One year, my neighbor thought they were weeds and yanked the mint out completely. She’s a bit batty and twitchy, a harmless but strange creature, and I know she meant no malice and probably thought she was doing us a favor. “Didn’t you think it was odd that the weeds smelled minty when you cut them?” I asked. “No, I didn’t notice that,” was her reply. She didn’t get ANY of my extra vegetables that year.

The peppermint grew back, and my neighbor left it alone last year. However, the company that does maintenance around the common property of my subdivision must have thought it was weeds too because I came home one day last summer to find that all the common area had been weeded, including my little mint. So that’s the story of why petunias are sitting there now.

(the peppermint in its glory days)

My hydrangea plants are growing quite nicely. The Endless Summer is shown above in the ground and the leaves look so lush and green.


And the Brestenburg is in a pot. I will try, yet again, to get these to turn blue. The best I got last year was a purple-ish color.


The hostas are making a nice comeback


And a surprise bulb popped up! I planted bulbs in a small patch in the backyard in 2008, my first attempt at flower gardening, and most of them rotted. I ended up starting that area over from scratch and planting blueberry bushes instead. But I guess one of the bulbs survived and here it is three years later!

Next post I will update the progress of my vegetable seedlings and list out what we’re growing this year.