>Over-wintering Geraniums

>Hello!

It’s been a while, so I thought I better get back on here and update bit. We’ve been doing a bit of our fall clean-up around the yard, and I remembered that I told you before that I would tell you all how I saved my geraniums over the winter last year. It totally worked, and this year I had beautiful, big geraniums. I’ll definitely do this again and again. A friend of mine told me how, so I won’t take the credit myself – but I figured it was info worth passing on!
Step 1: In the fall (any time now), dig the geraniums up, and shake off the dirt. Then set them in a box (not too tight, you want air to be able to get at them). Store the box in a cool, dry place. That’s the first step… pretty easy!

Step 2: In February, (sorry, I don’t have any pictures of this step), you’ll need to cut the roots back. They will be fine (like hair). After that, plant them in pots. If you have a sunny place to put them, that helps… but they need to stay inside. Water them as needed.

Step 3: In March, you need to give the plants a “haircut”. They will have grown quite a bit, and you want to cut them down to about 3-4″ plants. Don’t throw the stalks that you cut off away… those can be set in water, and they will root. The plants in the pots will make big plants, and the stalks will make smaller plants that are perfect for window boxes, planters, etc. Still keep them inside for the most part. I put them outside if we had a sunny warm day, but then took them back in at night. Once the stalks have rooted well, and there’s no more frost, they’re ready to be planted outside! Enjoy!

Just before the “haircut”.

After the haircut.

The stalks are rooting…

And here are a few pictures of what they looked like at the peak of the season:

>A card, the flower beds and something strange…

> Hello!
Just thought I’d post a couple things today. First off, this card. I actually made a few of them – this one is for one of the girls in our youth group who is moving to Alberta this week. I just changed the sentiment for the others so I could use them as “thank you” cards and I also made one into a wedding card. I used last weeks cupcake sketch on Taylor’s blog – I thought it was a fun one to work with. On this card, I used a tag for the sentiment, but I since got a new template for my circle cutter, allowing me to make 1/8″ matts, so I used that for the others instead. The big circle is cut from chatterbox scrapbook walls paper and the rest is either bazill or some other scraps I had. The ribbon is from my big box of ribbon I got at Costco.
As for the flowerbeds – here are some pictures of the front garden. I’m not the greatest photographer, and the flowers are just starting to fill out, so it’s hard to give you a good idea of what it all looks like, but we’re happy with how they look so far. We’ve started putting in a bit of a sprinkler system in the front beds to help us keep them watered well… and that’s a project that we’ll add to over the next few years. Just in case you want to know – we planted impatiens in the corner with the barrel… and the bed by the tree and our welcome sign as red salvia circling around the tree, yellow marigolds and a few purple wave petunias in the middle, and then alyssum (spelling?) around the edge.

As for the strange thing…
When we bought our house, most of the landscaping was in bad shape – and we pulled almost everything out, except for a few things, including two “rose of sharon” bushes. We haven’t really done a whole lot with them, just pruned them back each year, because they seem to grow really quickly. Anyways, this year, for some strange reason, only half of this bush/tree is budding! We didn’t do anything different to one side compared to the other – we can’t figure out what happened! Oh well… it’ll be interesting to see what happens to it next year!
Well, that’s all for now. Tomorrow we are going hiking for the day – we’re going to check out Needle Peak. Should be fun! Hiking is something we’ve talked about a lot, but not really done much of. It’ll be fun to get out there and actually do it!

>Sneak Preview…

>Yea for spring!!! We’re having such beautiful weather! And guess what that means at our house??? We finally get to plant our window boxes and flower beds. We are pretty excited about adding some color to our place again. Here’s a sneak preview of what we’ll be planting – hopefully I got enough for everything – our window boxes, hanging baskets, some of the flower beds… and if there are any left, we have a few planters that can be filled. We’ll see how it goes. For today, I’ll be focusing on the flower boxes, hanging baskets and one small part of my flower bed. The rest has to wait because we still have some tulips and daffodils around – and I won’t have time to deal with those (I think it might be best to let them sit for a while anyways, even though they’re looking kind of messy now). Anyways, that’s all for today – I’m so excited to get out there and start planting!

>It’s gardening time!

>We’re pretty excited to be seeing this nice weather again… and are planning a bunch of work in our yard. The flower bed in the backyard is a project we started last year – we put just a few plants in there and bought a couple of trees. I can’t remember the name of the one, but this one is a flowering plum tree - and we picked it because it gets nice little pink flowers in the spring.
On Saturday, while I was sleeping (I was between night shifts), Martin shoveled a layer of a blended topsoil over the whole flower bed, just to give the plants some extra nutrients and give us some nice soil to work with… so now it’s all ready for planting! Eventually, we want the whole thing (it goes around the perimeter of the back yard, along our fence line) to be nice and full of all kinds of different perennials – some tall, lots of flowers… but it’s a bit hard to know how to plan that all out.
Yesterday, a friend of mine lent me a book called “Mix-&-Match Gardening” – and it helps you plan out pretty much any kind of garden! I’m pretty excited to go through that and pick out some different plants. I’ll update every so often to let you know how the garden is coming!
Another fun project I’m working on that I’ll post sometime in late summer, or early fall, is wintering geraniums. This same friend also taught me how to save my geraniums over the winter, and how to go about getting them started again. I’m taking pictures of the different stages in the process, so that I can post a “tutorial” of sorts – in case you want to know how to save your geraniums! It’s kind of fun, cause they get bigger and bigger every year!

>Some spring color

>I’m so excited for spring to come! Last week, when we saw some sunshine, I couldn’t resist going to the greenhouse to buy a few flowers for the planters by the front door. It was fun to work with flowers again! Our window boxes all sit empty still… I’m looking forward to be able to fill those again – they’re one of our favorite things about our house! This year, we added some brackets to the window boxes – we really like the look of them – they’re very simple, but that’s the way we like it!