Start of the Week...

This contribution to the garden fits in so naturally.  I don't really ever plan to place things but use my gut feeling as I place them in the ground. The foliage in the back and the chives to the right seem to fit in with the coneflower.  The pitchfork without a handle seems to make a good garden ornament. I have old milk cans that I really don't think I will bring with me.  My neighbors are all going for the minimalist look and seems to lean on the abundance of grass to mow rather have any plants to maintain.

I trimmed the mums back in July and they still kept budding.  I see others in the neighborhood have their mums in bloom.  I thought maybe I would be able to slow them down and have them bloom later. It is a great color of mum and the former owners have three plantings of them.

I have grown hibiscus before and they seem to be more like an annual plant.  I had a dinner plate hibiscus that bloomed a couple of years in a row but the cold took it out.  I had another that survived three years but then it just froze out.

I bought this one and will see what I can do with it.  I have a couple of places that might give it more protection but getting a hole dug for it will require a pick ax. Some areas around the house are composed of packed-hard clay. I am up to the challenge to get some of that corrected but probably not this year.

The Japanese beetles are still around. Their numbers are way down but they are still out there.  I have sprayed almost every day for the past few weeks to slow them down. When they hit an area they eat up a lot of the leaves but the burrow into the zinnia  or marigold and kill the bloom.

It is Monday and the day ahead of me is really not planned.  I have an errand to run downtown Des Moines and plenty of work to do in the lower level of the house (basement). I am getting my office area set up down there and boxes are not sitting around anymore.  I have boxes that need to be sent to recycle and I do some each week.  I have the hibiscus and a daylily to get into the ground today or maybe tomorrow. We are getting a light sprinkle this morning which won't bring our dead grass back but anything will help. I am sure it will be gone in another hour.

I hope everyone is well. Thanks for checking in on me. As you can see my typing fingers are limber this morning and I have more words probably than necessary.

The Sunday Slides into Monday......

Getting my life in order really is never going to be a finished job. Sharing what I can makes me feel better probably more than it does for my readers. It gets to be an obsession of getting a job done and taking a photo quick to share.

It looks like a used car lot now, rather than a pile of cars and trucks.  I eliminated one collection of wild birds figures from the cupboard and it gave me more space to properly display things.

The firetruck on the top of the cupboard looks pretty bad when I viewed the original product on an Antiques show recently. The original firetruck was a fancy looking light brown truck with hoses and a person in the seat.

The original toy was a fancy toy.  I inherited the truck from my "John and Iva" connection. The  four boys who played with this are all 80 years old or more. The one boy died on Normandy Beach and is buried in France.

The rewarding thing about gardening is when plants respond to special attention. I bought this rose a few weeks ago looking pretty sick.  Trimmed it all back and put it in the ground with some black potting soil.  Now it is shooting out buds. I don't know for sure that it will survive the winter but I will mulch it heavily and hope for the best.

The honeysuckle vine is blooming for the third time this season.  I was not familiar with the shrub and did notice recently that this once was a very large shrub.  It was cut back.  What I like about it is that the regular honeysuckle shrub only blooms in the spring, not continually. I guess I won't be surprised if it blooms at least one more time before the snow flies.

The knock out roses are reviving again after our one severe heat wave. I kept watering them and they did rebut and are in bloom.

Sunday looks like a pleasant day weather-wise. We are unseasonably cool right now but I am sure the heat will return. Schools open up in a few weeks and the State Fair starts this week.  It is the end of summer events that are beginning as we keep on "keeping on".  Thank you for stopping by.  Have a great day.

Stuff for Saturday......

The buds finally have opened on this large leafed hosta. 

What is it? Squash I am assuming, but I really have not seen anything like it before now. It is growing from a volunteer vine in my garden.

A revived petunia, back from the dead.  It just not take the heat with the flimsy soil mixture that they plant in there plastic posts.  Thanks for coming by today.

The Truck is Working Better!

Early morning and the real sky was pinker.

Reworking the basement so it won't look like a basement, this group is all wooden except for the bowl.

The workroom/furnace room looks better but there are many things to still needing to be organizes.

Toy cupboard looks a little blurry today but it is in a much better order.

Have a great day. Thanks for checking in today. 

The Things I Share......

The root system of the tiger lily including bulb survived my digging it and moving it to the back yard.   Back at the old home the surprise lilies have buds and are close to blooming. I doubt I try to move them. It is getting to the point that I don't want to move much more.  I tried to pull loose some phlox roots yesterday and I will need a spade if I am getting them out of the ground.

The larger yellow day lily finally bloomed after all of the rest of the blooms are done.  It sat as a bud for a week or so. The vase is a memory of two friends and their kids who moved to New Mexico a couple of weeks ago. Norm and Heidi used my dumpster to put in the last minute things that they just didn't want to move. I saw it laying in the dumpster and said that will do for bringing home some cut flowers.

I learned about skippers from my blogger friends. I don't know much about them and if there is larger variety of them. They do dart back and forth on the flowers and it seemed impossible to get any shot of them.

We had a wonderful sunrise for about three minutes this morning. I didn't really get a shot of it but yesterday's sunglow was impressive.  We are getting rain this morning.  I hope it helps with our yards a little. We are in dead, dormant stage right now as the sub moisture is lacking.  It looks like the rain we are getting now will keep me from having to water tomatoes and flowers today. It is welcomed.

Thanks for checking in on my post today.

Pushing Pots Around......

While working in the downstairs shop/storeroom yesterday I unpacked my pottery pieces.  I had packed boxes often and on for a month at the old house and really didn't have an idea as to how many pieces I was moving.  As I kept finding more boxes of pottery to unpack, I was wishing my wife would have told me not to bring so much pottery.

The blurry photo shows the shelving unit that I had put up for storing some various things but I ran out of space quickly. I went back today to get some more bracing pieces to  hold up the shelves as I have visions of the brackets not holding up the weight.

So I have another shelivng unit that sits nearby and it too is almost full. I usually made example pieces for the students to see while teaching the process.  A lot of these are those samples.  I also found four or five college pieces in the group.

I can weed out a few for sure as they have chips in them, then they go. I guess I need to set out my criteria of the perfect pot and then check to see which one will meet the criteria.

We are having a warm day again.  We did get a little rain but I am thinking it was not a large amount. The deck had two boards, low spots, with standing water on them. I thank you for stopping by today. I hope all of you are well.

Dealing with a Collection......

I finally unloaded my toy collection boxes.  I was glad to get to it but then found that not everything was in the two boxes. I have a lot of farm animals but they were not in this box.  I also have some glass toys, very old, that were not in this box.

Everything is still in the middle of the room as I decided to install one more shelf.  I played the sound on the train yesterday and it really upset the cockatiels.  It makes puffing sounds and then a train whistle goes off. The birds really squawk with warning sounds telling the train to leave them alone.

The cupboard is an old oat sprouter that has a metal lining in it so the wood wouldn't be effected by the moisture of the damp soil in trays. The two shelves you see here are probably not original ones as they may have been wire racks to allow the heat from the light bulb below and the moisture to accumulate inside the box. When then was sold, farmers liked to sprout oats to use for feeding their chickens in the winter. The cupboard was not intended for a piece of furniture so the original finish on the wood was a rough wood with a shellac finish.

I did get the new shelf installed so I can sort things out today. Most of the collections are really odds and ends that I have picked up in life or as gifts. Not one collection of one kind is very extensive.

Those who have been following along regularly know that I still had a gaping joint on the one side of the birds eye maple piece.  I found a thin enough piece of wood to place in the crack and it is all glued together. The fourteen year old kid didn't get the joint cut correctly in one place so the side piece would never go together flush. The filler piece is not made from great wood but it is a good visual filler. Today I will carve off the excess and sand and seal up the last part of this piece.

We are still not sure how we will use the shelved piece of furniture, formerly a flower stand, but we are thinking we can place some books on some of the shelves and display some of my wife ceramic dolls on the rest.  There will be a visual shown once we make the final decision.  I really am glad now that I had not taken the skill saw to it and cut it up.

This is one of my glass collection of toys that I did find.  Candy came inside of the glass plane and then the plane was used as a toy. This one is really beat up but you can see the American star symbol on the wing of it.  I will find the other 5 or more pieces that are packed with glassware somewhere else.

I had to go buy more spray to ward off the Japanese beetles. They are landing out there every evening. The spray, my wife pointed out, really is a combo fertilizer and a liquid that helps to kill the bugs without poison. I had not noticed that before but that means the spray is not something they eat. The coating of it stops them from breathing. I do have to check in the morning as some do show up. Mostly though they fly in at sunset.  I took this shot as it is a different color for me to have of a zinnia.

This is another color that I don't think I have ever seen before in my planting of seeds. The three rows of flowers this year is making up for not having planted a single one last year at the old place.

I have no definitely plans today but  am in a healing mode of lifestyle right now. I am trying to heal up from messed up arthritic hands and a pulled muscle in my one arm.  I do heal up from this stuff but I do have to be so less active to get caught up on the healing.  I can type today so things are better with the fingers.  Picking up a stepladder to replace the five fire alarms in the house won't have to be done again in six months so I can watch what I am doing. We are going to be hotter today and the grass is really slowed down in its growth cycle. I have to stay away for mowers because of my hands and the arm. I am ok with that.

Thanks for stopping by today.  I wish everyone to have a great day.