Saturday's Short Stop..........

A creative shot of my clematis on the garden gate.  I like how it  has the look of a lotus flower from the side view.

The center is wonderfully colored from the two or three different colors of stamens in the center. As a blogger friend pointed out, I have a living creature in the photo.

One last bud for this vine.  I hope it reblooms but I don't think that it will.  My purple clematis will be opening soon. It is a small flower with pure purple color.


Thanks for stopping by today.

Friday's Showing.........

Peonies are early this year because of many reasons.  The first of my white peony came out yesterday. The variety of colors you see in the flower are real.  They have pink and yellow colors blended in among the white.

This little guy was at the feeder last evening.  His fluffy feathers tells me he is a newly hatched bird this past month.  The adults were out and calling territorial calls all evening.

The bad think about the wild rose is that it takes over the entire acreage if it were allowed to grow.  I mow it to keep it back as it's roots continue to shoot all over my back yard.  It really isn't much more of a nuisance than the Chinese Elm tree as it too has shoots all over the property.  I still have new trees that try to come up from a neighbors Chinese Elm hedge that actually was removed thirty years ago.

The wild rose does have a great fragrance.  That is a positive to get such a great smell in the back yard.   The mock orange is starting to bloom and that will give out a fragrance for half a block away from the bush.

I am the science master again in the high school as well as middle school physical education.  It is a good thing that I like pitching wiffle ball as I have done it for two straight days now.

Friday, it is great that it is here.  Thanks for stopping by my post today.

Thursday's Checking In........

The red daisies lay on the ground among the violets and creeping Charlie.  You have a top, side and back view with the three flowers.

Another shot of my old fashion iris.  I am glad it is doing so well as it has been planted there for quite a few years.

Group shot of the 'Superstition" iris shows how robust this iris is.  It has large fans of leaves and many stalks of flowers.

It is a first period of sitting with a middle school band.  It is touch and go as to who will be sent to the office.  I may send myself to the office and have the principal experience her children live.


Thanks for stopping by today.  Friday is coming very soon. It is only a day away.

Wandering Wednesday........

As a child the only iris I would ever see were the ones growing in the cemetery.  I would be with my parents as they would go to the Murray and Macksburg cemeteries to decorate.  The one's that stuck in my mind was the brown and yellow one.

There are sites on the internet that talk about these iris and they call them "cemetery iris."  When I write about them,  fellow blogger friends sometimes think I made that up but I didn't.  The blue and white one is one of my favorites in my collection.

This is the brown and yellow one that always impressed me when I was a kid.  I think every family farm had it growing like a weed among their grassed in areas of the yards.  In those days we really didn't mow our yards so gardens were growing among the tall orchard grass.

I have a book about iris and the author wrote as fact that the one above has been named "Bumble Bee."  The author wrote that all the hybrid iris we see today came from this one iris.  They used it to create all the single color iris as well as the two colored and variegated iris.

The one above actually has been bred to have a white trim around the edges of the falls.  One can buy them today from growers in the United States.

This is a repeat showing of this cemetery iris.  It is a fragile one as the rains kept if from being very showy.  I may still get a better shot of it but it doesn't do well in the rain.  I had a lavender one of this kind but I think it died out.  I am always on the look out for it in gardens and the cemeteries.

This is another view of my white large clematis.  It has done well this year and already two of the blooms have faded away.  I hope it doesn't get that disease where it dies down suddenly.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today. 

Tuesday's Things.........

The dark buds really don't help one to know what color the iris will be. This probably ia more of a red-brown iris as the camera doesn't pick up red colors accurately.  This iris sat about three feet back from it's present location.  I moved it away from a forsythia bush and out into the sun.  This is the second year that it has bloomed but only two stalks of buds came up this year instead of the three that came up last year.  I may move the back portion to another location in my garden.

 

 I keep taking pictures of this wiegela as the rains have made it really bloom.

This small rose has many buds on it and they flowers are really nice.  It has many blooms and if I keep them cut back they will bloom most of the summer.

I took a shot of the new sprouts from the leaf starts.  I am not going to rush into replanting these as I want lots of roots on them before I move them.

The old traditional iris is starting to bloom.  My neighbor was given this also and it bloomed earlier than mine.  Her iris did not survive the rains and the winds and they looked like a hurricane had hit them. I am glad my waited to bloom later.

It is a bazinga day at school for me.  Each day some group of students sneak in and treat a teacher's room to a special hazing.   The Spanish teacher is gone the first two hours.  When I, the sub, entered the room I had to remove a criminal yellow tape from the door.  When I walked in,  every student desk had been flipped upside down but all neatly still in the right location.  He also has his desk covered with balloons.  Since I have only two classes today before he returns the kids are going to sit on the floor and also leave the balloons in place so he can see it all when he returns.  The students like sitting on the floor anyway even though a couple are sitting on the desk while it is upside down.

Bazinga is a friendly honor to the staff.  I am not sure that it is students but I suspect if it isn't, that a staff person had to have student help to accomplish this.  In order to teach sit-in's of the sixties last week, one of the staff social studies teachers had one, in the neighbor's classroom, unannounced.  It probably wasted five minutes of class time but these kids don't know what sit-ins look like unless they watch Occupy people today.

We awakened this morning to the sound of our furnish running again.  It was 50 degrees F. last night and won't warm up to 65 degrees today. Thank you for stopping by my post today.

Rain and Wind.......

The rain and wind is a love/hate relationship to our world.  I like that we have rain and I don't like drought.  I don't like so much rain that it wrecks the spring flowers.  But the wind has been menacing.  Most of my larger blooming irs are laying on the ground from too much water and high wind breaking them down.

The cemetery iris above is going to have a few more blooms so I should get a better photo.  They whole lot of the iris look like they have been through hurricane Lawrence.

The fernleaf peonies are all done but one branch must have slept in or something.  The last two small buds came out on Saturday.

These buds have opened and the were on the ground yesterday from the wind.  I will show you tomorrow what the color is of this iris.  Think red everybody, or maybe red-brown.

I do not know the name of this rose. The plant has many blooms on them and the actual flower is half the size of a normal rose.  I like the rose as I trim off the spent roses and it sets up new buds immediately.

Saturday proved to be an interesting day in Woodward, Iowa.  They put in a new track around the football field and it had been put to good use.  They had a Junior High State Track Meet at the new track.  It was said that over 100 different schools were sending students to the meet.  We live four blocks from the area and we had cars lined up and down our street.  The town was doubled in size just for one day.

I am an art teacher in the morning and a special education teacher in the afternoon. We are running out of Mondays before school will be out.  It has seemed like a short school, but not as short as my last weekend.

Hey, we watched the new PBS version of Sherlock Holmes done in our present time period.  It is done well.  We watched three episodes in a row and became a lot loony.  What I found interesting was the fact that Dr. Watson, wrote about all that they did on his BLOG.  So the whole world was keeping track of them in the modern world as they were solving cases.  Once in a while in the dialog Holmes would ask another person how he knew his information and the person would reply, "I read it on the blog."

Thanks for stopping by today.

Sunday's Blooms.......

The pink wiegela keeps putting out great blooms.  The bush has grown so large that it is banging its branches against a window every time the wind blows.

This is the iris that my parents had planted on the south side of their garage.  I moved it up here and it seems to be a very hearty iris.  I don't know it's history as they moved from one property to their last property and they could have moved it with them. 

This is my favorite iris in the bunch out there. I like it's light purple almost blue color.  It is doing so well right now but we just had a downpour rain. I am sure it took some damage.  I have a few cemetery iris yet to bloom and the one very dark one that blooms wonderful flowers. I also have a red brown iris that is going to bloom in the next couple of days.

Monday is coming.  I will be back at school tomorrow. I spent two hours mowing on Saturday and did not get done. I spent half the time, changing oil, cleaning up the air filter, cleaning the spark plug and finally messed with a failing cable that allows the mower to run. The mower kept dying and I would fix the next thing thinking I could keep it running. I want to throw that old mower away but won't probably until the end of the season.  There is a functioning mower behind all that stalling of the machine.  I will just keep messing with it to keep it working.

Thanks for stopping by my post today.