Tend My Garden

[Prettymaid]

I'll have to check out your album later - I'm only home for lunch - Back to work!

[Brooke]

Pm and Mike, both of your gardens are lovely. Thanks for sharing those.

Hubby and I enjoy doing the same thing and I will try to find a pic of our efforts to post soon.

[tbs fanatic]

What lovely gardens you have. I'm afraid I am hopeless as a gardener. Fortunately hubby loves gardening and has, over many years, turned our yard, albeit small, into a very nice place to relax in. Will have to see if I have some pics.

[Prettymaid]

Mike your clematis is beautiful! Ours is climbing up the arbor in our back yard.
We planted it a couple of years ago. In the bottom right corner you can see where Hubby is building our new deck.




A closeup of the clematis

[MikeA]

<<Mike your clematis is beautiful!>>

So THAT'S how you spell it! <LOL> You guys have a huge landscaped area Cathy! Beautiful! All that shade and all that grass! My envy is seeping through! We are getting to a point of needing to do some serious work on the yard. Hard to get an even cover of grass here. A neighbor just put in a new yard from scratch along with a sprinkler system. I don't know if I want to go to that expense!

[Prettymaid]

Mike how's that saying go - we always want what we don't have! I can only grow shade loving plants in the secret garden and backyard. A little more sun would be nice sometimes! Lol! We do get a full day's sun in the front yard, so I can get some good color there, which is good, cos that's what people see from the road.

[Brooke]

Pm, your 'secret garden' is just lovely! (Have you read that book? It's so cute!) And I think I have a clematis just like yours. I really wanted the old time purple with the yellow center, but that is what I got. It's still pretty.

[Prettymaid]

Thanks everybody! And Brooke, I look forward to your pictures.

[MikeA]

There is a "story" behind the "butt rock" in the pic I'm putting here. Called it a "butt rock" because Verna thought she would need a large "rock" to sit on and dangle her feet into the water from. That was well before we saw turtles, frogs, snakes and snails gather at the pond! And also before I stocked it with Goldfish. No Koi. Too expensive and way too much danger from Blue Heron!

Anyway, we found that stone that is shown so prominent at the front edge of the large pond at the Rock Quarry. It weighs 975 pounds. I hauled it home on a tilt trailer and dumped it at the gate into our back yard. But that left it some 40 yards away from the pond where we wanted to "plant it".

Verna and I moved that rock ourselves as we did every rock in out back yard! I think I was around 47 or 48 at the time and was feeling that I needed to prove that I could still do stupid things!

We "log-rolled" that rock into place! I put round landscaping timbers (5 or 6 of them) under it and then tied rope around it and hooked it onto the lawn tractor. As it rolled off of a timber, we picked that timber up and placed it in front of the rock and pulled it a few more inches. That worked well until we got about a tractor's length from the edge of the pond! And then discovered we didn't have the strength to push it the rest of the way into position!

My father-in-law came from a "farming" background though and had a "come-a-long" or as some may know it a "fence stretcher". It is a manual wench. We literally wrapped one end of it around the waterfall and the other around the boulder. One Inch at a time, we wenched it into place, PRAYING that it wouldn't tip over and fall into the empty pond. We already had the liner for the pond in place and the boulder would not only have fallen to the bottom of the pond but would also have punched a massive hole in the liner!

We got lucky and it slid pretty much into the position you see it. We had dug out a place for it so it is about 1/3 buried to give it stability. It only cost a few crushed vertebrae to wobble it into it's final position. But we DONE IT.

[tbs fanatic]

That is beautiful. Oh, I would love a pond in our yard .