Twin Cities Garden Tour Wrap Up

You see, in my yard, next to the driveway is this triangular shaped patch of dirt. We've tried growing grass, we've had a vegetable garden here. Each has done okay, but this odd shaped patch of our yard was really useless. Mowing the grass with a lawn mower in this area was awkward, the vegetable garden didn't have enough room to grow. So now we've come to flowers for this patch of land. Ahhh, this works great for this tiny area. We've transplanted a couple things in the spring, but need to fill in the bare spots yet. If you walk around to the back yard, I built about a 25 foot flower box that wraps around the back porch. You can see a bit of it in the smaller photos below with the white lattice fence.

  

Cottage Grove Garden Tour - Day 3

This is our third year with the Lily's. The year we first planted them, it produced zero flowers. The second year the Lily produced four flowers. This year, we had 18 to 22 flowers bloom. After a slow start, I would like to get more of these for next year as the aroma it gives off is amazing, not to mention the looks of the flowers. The stem on these Lily's is about 4 foot tall. We lost the tag of the exact kind of Lily, I've done a bit of Google searching and the best I could come up with was these are "Stargazer Lily's". Though the images I'm finding don't quite look exactly like my photos. Perhaps someone out there can identify what type of Lily it really is.

Garden Tour 2008 - Day 2

I'm not sure which of my plants leaves this is from, but the drops of rain caught my eye.

Twin Cities Garden Tour 2008

It's the 2nd annual, summer time, Twin Cities Garden Tour 2008! Of course it's held in the summer as the other half of the year in the Twin Cities is covered with a blanket of snow. The flowers on this garden tour do come from the garden located in my very own yard.

Small Things Growing In Nature

This is one of my favorite daytime shots I took using the macro setting. How large is this mushroom? About an inch to an inch and a half wide. There were many signs of growing mushrooms in the heavily moisture of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. There has been quite a bit of rain in the midwest as many of you are aware of. I was surprised when I returned from my week in the BWCA to find so much rain and flooding in many of the midwestern states.

More Colorful Photos From The State Fair Grounds

One more contribution photo from swc. These flowers can be seen as you enter the main entrance to the Minnesota State Fair Grounds. It's now been almost four months now since my garden of flowers and vegetables has been dormant from the cold climate. This colorful scene can only be found indoors during the long cold winter months. That's just how it is around here.

Wild Flower

I hate to do this, but I need to take a break from all of these cold, wintery photos and post a colorful photo taken back in August 2007 from the Minnesota State Fair grounds by contributor swc. These very large, hand grown flowers can be found at the main entrance to the grounds.

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Late Bloomer

The bees have been busy as of late, we have one flower bush that is just starting to flower. It's taken all summer long for these to start to bloom. The bees have taken to this flower and I cannot recall the name of it, but it has a very late summer bloom. I've seen about six to twelve bees roaming on the flowers, oddly enough, it's only this type of bee that I've seen on it.

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Run Through Your Wicked Garden

Two summers, well close to two summers it's been since we planted these flowers. Last spring we planted two plants, Lilium Hybrid 'Tom Pouce'. We watered it all last summer, there was the main stem, but it never produced any flowers. Up they grew once again this summer and sure enough, finally all that watering has paid off. I wish you all could smell this flower through your monitor. It has an incredible smell from five, ten, even fifteen feet away. It's very over powering. Thank goodness my allergies only happen during the spring season. The flower has to be six to seven inches wide. The stem is about 24 inches tall. This flower will be on our list to get next year and if it takes two summers for the flowers to bloom, it's well worth it.