Mothers Day Flowers

My mothers day gift from Mac was two beautiful yellow rose bushes. We spent saturday putting them in the ground. We also spent the day sprucing up the yard and making the front yard more appealing. I love flowers just because they make me smile. When I drive up after a hard day seeing the flowers blooming in my yard just warm my heart and act as a de-stressor. I think thats why spring time is so rejuvenating to me. It is when life comes back to earth, and gives you the feeling that you get to start all over again. Flowers are the culmination of this time, and lets you know that all your hard work during the year is now coming to fruition. I believe the ancients had it right with the new year begining in April;it just feels like things are begining at this time.

I now have six rose bushes in my yard. I'm hoping that the three that were planted this weekend will take root so I will have even more roses next year.I have one pink rose bush that is not growing very well, and I'm not sure why. I weeded around the bush this week-end, and tried aerating the soil. I notice alot of black beetles in the base of the bush. I'm not sure if this is why this particular bush is not growing as well as the others. I made a mixture of vinegar, dish soap and water and poured around the root. Does any one have any other suggestion. I'm trying hard to minimze the amount of toxic chemicals I use on my yard.

There are may different uses for rose including medicinal uses. I will be collecting the petals and leaves to dry out to include in my homemade potpouri. If anyone has any good potpouri receipes why not share them. The receipe I have is as follows
Potpouri receipe

2 Cups of Dried rose flowers
2 Cups of dried Lavender flowers
2 cups rose leaf
1/4 cup of cloves
6 drops of rose essential oil
4 drops of lavender oil




I think tonight I'm also going to lay back and take a rose petal bath and drink a nice glass of pinot noir. Talk about pampering yourself!!!

LANIMAC Garden 2010

We have started our garden. 2010 is the year that we plan to get back to nature and relearn that which our forefathers and mothers new, but we have lost. I am keeping a record of this so that I may look back on our gardening exeperience and hopeully learn and improve for next year. I hope to hear from everyone to give us input and advice to make our garden the best it can be.So lets get started.

First I will tell you that I live in Georgia with the red clay. So in order to improve the soil we had to add organic matter to it. Last year Mac build me a compost bin. It is basically a square box that we threw all of our waste into. Like the rinds of fruits and veetables, coffee grounds egg shells and sticks and leaves. To get it started we also found plenty of worms and threw in there. Our Compost bin is now two years old, and I must say that we have been able to get very good soil to mix with our red clay. Initially we thought it might be easier to just by a bag of compost or top soil from our local nusery, but at the price of 3-4 dollars a bag we decided to turn our compost bin and get as much out as we could. We were truly surprised to find how much compost we actually had.


Second we had to determine exactly what we wanted to plant. We initially had just wanted to hae some green peppers and tomatoes mostly because of the cost in the grocery store( $1.25 for one green pepper) All year long we have been complaining about that. Happy to pay less than a dollar. Anyway so we brouht ourselves pepper plants and some tomatoe plants. However everytime we went to the store we found more thins we wanted to try. We now have green peppers, red peppers, grape tomatoes, big boy tomatoes, eggplant, onions bannana peppers all growing.




Next I decided I wanted a fresh herb garden; when I went to purchase some fresh basil and found a small container was $1.99. As I was walking to the check out counter in Publix, I noticed they had herbal plants 2 for four dollars, so I decided it would be cheaper for me just to throw those in the ground as well. So again I had Mac digging out a small area for me to have a fresh herb garden. T make it look pretty, I had Darious and Clayton find me large rocks to surround the garden. Initially it was just going to be Basil, thyme , parsley, but I kept finding different herbs I wanted to try. I have now completely filled up the area.



Lastly Mac had this idea that we could put some watermelon plants on the hill behind our house and let then run down the hill. So we put in the watermelon, then thought well it should work for canteloupe as well. Beore you know it we had all our runner plants coming down the hill. We have watermelon, canteloupe, zucchini, squash and cucumbers on the side of our hill.
Over the course of the summer I'll let everyone know how the garden is coming, and our pitalls along our journey. And I'll also let you know what we did with all this food.I'm looking forward to a delicious summer.