Fleurs

The other night I took the dictator for a walk and felt guilty.  Truth be told, I've been feeling guilty a lot lately.  I feel like I've been neglecting my furniture.  We're working on some custom projects for customers, and as a result I've had to tuck my own pieces away to allow us enough room to work.  And while progress is being made on the custom work, it's not necessarily something we can plow through in a couple days time especially given that completion of a couple of the pieces is somewhat dependent on the weather.  So I've inadvertently been left with some free time.  

Free time that I feel guilty enjoying.  

Maybe I burned myself out by trying to complete as many pieces as possible on my week off.  The nice part of my week off was that I was able to work on my pieces during the day, and spend time with Terry and the boys in the evening.  But now I'm back at work and it's back to our far more normal routine of me coming home and retreating to my hole in the basement.  To avoid further furniture burn-out, I'm trying to stick to the custom pieces we're working on.  It's hard to do that when you've got a basement full of unfinished furniture, which is why I feel guilty when I take my dog for a walk. 

So far this post isn't about flowers at all. 

But that's the other thing I've been doing with some of my free time.  My weekends are normally devoted to my furniture in some capacity, but spending my week off working on furniture allowed me to justify working in my yard on the weekend.  I feel like I've missed out on Summer and couldn't believe nurseries were already having their End of Season sales, so my itch to garden came at just the right time.  

I like my plants like I like my furniture: broken, pitiful looking, and most importantly half-price.

So in addition to walking my dog, I've been planting flowers.  I'm not much for Annuals because I know my limitations and I just now pulled up the dead mums in one of my beds from LAST fall.  So yeah, I'm going to stay away from Annuals.  

Except for mums because they're pretty and they make me think of fall and they look nice with pumpkins.  This year they're going in pots which I can easily move when I neglect them so I won't have to look at dead mums for a year.

Any and all plants of mine pretty much need to fend for themselves.  Oh, I'll water them.  And I'll give them some Miracle-Gro (which makes me feel like I'm cheating) and I'll prune them if they need it (none of them need it in their current state because I'm pretty sure they're clinging to life as is), but that's it.  I'm not testing ph levels, or composting fresh soil additives.  I'm lucky I get around to mulching twice a year.  

So yea, I planted some plants.  18 to be exact.

Of the 18, three of them are planted in planters.  Which means I dug 15 holes.  Which means we are never moving from this house, ever.  

With the abundance of sun we get in our backyard, it would be wrong to not take advantage of it.  All of my new plants are flowering perennials.  Four different types of Hydrangea, three different types of Lavender, Peonies, Campanula, Salvia, and Hibiscus.  And unlike rehabbing furniture, rehabbing plants is fun for the whole family! 

  

Frito totally thinks I should have gone for the Hidcote Lavender instead of the English Lavender.  And if I really want to stretch it, I could make the argument that fresh cut flowers look lovely as part of my furniture display, so planting all this wonderful flowers is technically a business investment.  

Now all they have to do is...