A Successful Carful of Chores

I had a whole slew of chores to do, and managed to burn though all of them:
• Buy additional wood for trim for the windows I forgot to include in the previous tally
• Take said wood to the millwork place to get it stripped to width (they didn't charge me! Yay!)
• Buy herbs for a kitchen garden (actually indoors! Squirrel proof!)
• Buy flowers for the rock wall in the backyard and for planters.
• Buy a strawberry pot and pea gravel.

Here's the evidence (and I still love that every seat in the Matrix folds flat – I can't count the number of times that feature has been useful):



I was psyched to come across a fundraising carwash at the end of the errands! It was a high school aged cheer group and their dads, and they did an amazing job scrubbing off the last of the road trip bugs. :-) (I would have done it myself, but our entire areas has edicts against soap in the storm drains because of the salmon. You can use plain water in your driveway, but can't add anything to it. 2000 miles of bugs requires soap.)

Here are the plants on the patio, awaiting planting. Pretty.



I decided on three groupings on the rock wall. To the far left, I ripped out a ton of fennel and mint, and made a place for an English Lavender and two "Shock wave pink vein" petunias. They're really more of a light purple, and I'm hoping they spread.



The photos from here on in are all dark, since I didn't take them until 8:40 – sorry! But knowing me, this will be a photo topic in the weeks to come, and you'll get to see the light and bright versions soon.

In the middle of the wall, to the left of the path, I cleared out a pretty large space. In back are the tall "Lady in Red" Salvia. We've already seen a hummingbird checking them out! In front of those, I planted three zinnias (two "Magellan Salmon" and one "Magellan Coral") and then four marigolds (a mix of "Zenith Orange" and the dwarf "Durango Orange"). The brilliant red one in the foreground is a "Lanai Cherry Red" Verbena – it is sensationally bright and I love it.




On the far right of the rock wall, Kevin dug out two shrubby pine things, and I pulled plenty of mint and forget-me-nots to make space for more marigolds, zinnias, and verbena.



The plant you see in the foreground between the two rocks is a honey melon sage. This is the third one I've bought in Seattle, and the smell is truly splendid, plus it's starting to bloom delicate trumpet flowers. I was happy to find one at the nursery – it's a great plant.

This guy is the ultimate in wishful thinking on my part, but we'll see:



A sunflower. It's already tracking the sun, even though the flower is still a ways away. I'm completely enamoured with it.