dirtylibrarian

Saturday I had hoped to drag my out of town guest on the Columbia City Garden tour, but she was too busy going to weddings. Apparently EVERYBODY was too busy doing other stuff, so I ended up going myself, which was not too bad. I got a late start, and only had 2 hours to do the whole thing, which wasn't too bad...I made it to 17 of 18 houses, walking about 2 miles total, I think. It was a really nice reason to be out for a walk on a gorgeous day, and an excellent excuse to check out the back yards of strangers, which is just fun. I saw a lot of great plants, and got all kinds of ideas for my own yard. Unfortunately, I think to really do my yard right I will have to take out tons of grass, and create beds along the most of the fence lines. This could take years. But that was a cool thing about the walk, is the folks sharing were really happy to talk about how long it took them to get there, and while some were amazingly fast and organized, others just did a bit each year.

Things I saw I would really like to have at my place someday:

1) purple gazing ball - so pretty!
2) more orange flowers
3) bee houses
4) chickens!
5) little pond with fish
6) tiny French(?) strawberries
7) more raised vegetable beds

If you like gardening, I totally recommend checking out one of these tours sometime.

Tons of pictures at my flickr site, for those of you in the know. If you can identify some of the plants, that would be great. I'm hopeless at remembering names of stuff.