Windstar Memorial Garden...

As a part of our spring cleaning I finally got rid of the 1995 Windstar Van. It had set there with major mechanical problems. The van had given us such good times with trips to Colorado and to Minnesota and Kansas City. It was like driving an airplane. The bucket seats were so comfortable and I moved wood, furniture, windmills, garbage, and large groups of teachers to various workshops. At the right place at the right time a man paid me one hundred dollars as a gift so he could scrap it and sell it's parts. It was so rusted out underneath and the one brake literally had broken loose. The rack and pinion was gone. Ok, I loved that van and it is gone. I missed the stimulus plan by four months.
I was going to seed grass over the spot that is between the sidewalk and the street and then I thought, why not a few annuals for just one year. I planted it with zinnias, bachelor buttons, and some basil plants. I didn't expect it to work. I didn't even till it, I just used a hoe and made rows in the soil.
Our weather, this year only, proved to be on my side as it rained every four or five days all of May and some of June. It made the seeds sprout and grow readily and the weeds were minimal.
I had some red petunias left over from the plantings in my group plantings in pots. They were stuck in just to get rid of them. No real plan as I put this plants in the garden. I had to go back a buy some extra zinnias as the fall harvest seeds weren't enough. They were Martha Stewart's brand of ivory white zinnias.
I mentioned in an earlier blog that the land between the sidewalk and the street really belongs to the city. I am required to take care of it and maintain the trimming of any trees. If a storm knocks big branches out of one of my trees into the street, the city takes a blade on a truck and pushes it back into my yard for me to take care of. If the tree dies, they will pay for taking it down and if they think that a tree is dangerous they take it down with out informing you of intent. I had a large silver maple on the corner of my property and I went to work on day and came back finding it laying in the street being cut up by the local woodworking man. He said the wood would work well for some of his secondary wood in furniture.He also said that they were going to take the other two large old silver maples, down the way on my property. My neighbors heard wind of that and went to city hall on that one and their pleas were heard. They never took those trees, at least not for a couple of years.
Needless to say I wondered if I would get into trouble by putting a flower garden out there. This is a small village sized town and we are full of old houses but we have adopted the rules of cities as big as Des Moines. That is why I though I would probably be asked to mow it down.
So here we are in August and the area looks great. I have been taking dozens of macros of the different colors of zinnias and bachelor buttons. It has a lot of neat areas to look at while you walk around it, seeing rows of color and different heights of flowers.

It has turned out to be a successful project. I liked taking progressive pictures and it was hard not to show before it was time. Thanks for reading.....