The Flowerbed in Front of our House

It has been so rainy that I haven’t been able to do much work in the flower beds around our house. In the front, the growth is luxuriant. The chives seem to be growing faster than I can harvest them to add to salads. Yesterday I added a handful of chopped chives (flowers and all) to pureed hardboiled egg and hummus. I spread it in a pita and used the leftover as a ‘dip’ for celery sticks and carrot chips. Yum!

All around the chives, the day lilies are everywhere and the deer have not bothered them like they have in the past few years (eating the leaves down to the ground as fast as they grew). Hopefully with all the other food this spring, the deer will leave the lilies along. Comin up next to the downspout from the gutter are two milkweed plants. They are weeds – but I’m going to let them grow and hope that some monarch butterflies visit our garden to lay their eggs.

Do you see the tulip poplar seedling? That is something I need to pull before it gets any bigger. The daylilies and Black Eyed Susans will stay.

And then there are the irises – just beginning to bloom. Some of the buds look like they got waterlogged or too cold and are not developing further. But the plants that are blooming are gorgeous as usual. I like them even more because the largest grouping of irises is visible from the skinny windows that frame our front door.

On the other side of the front – there is another milkweed growing in a bed that is being overrun by grass. Some focused pulling needs to happen all around it and the young nine-bark bush we planted a year ago.

The front of the house looks very green – and will look even better as soon as I am home on a sunny day and spend the time to do a bit of clean up and out in the front flowerbed!