A Selective Interpretation of Our Backyard

Back at the end of June I took some photos of our back yard. It was green back then. Now it's mostly brown and lifeless, since it's been really dry this summer and I refuse to water grass since I see it as the most useless waste of water possible.

So yes, these photos are really old. But let's just let them be a reminder of simpler, greener, moister times.

Our house hadn't been painted yet when I took these photos, so if you look in the background of some of these photos and see what our house used to look like you can see why we had to paint. And in a roundabout way, you can understand why my blogging has been very rare this summer.

Anyway, here are photos from late June.

Stuff in our rain garden that we made (well, we had someone do it for us) to keep our basement from flooding (that was a few summers ago and so far, no flooding!). These are all native, except for the bushy fern in the second photo ... at least I don't think that one's native.




I love our Columbines. These two photos were taken before I all but destroyed this plant with scaffolding while I power washed the old paint off our house.




This year, I decided to leave a couple patches of grass unmowed, just for the hell of it. The first time I mowed my neighbor told me I missed a spot. I replied that I tried that. She probably thought I was joking. Well, who's joking now!

One of the patches is a square on one side of the back yard. It did pretty good until it stopped raining. It's now a patch of long, brown, horizontal grass.






The other patch is a nice long strip of grass that goes down our little back yard hill and everything. 


I think next year I'm going to try my hand at a little labyrinth for Anna to play in. Because the kids we have over always gravitate to the long grass. They're fascinated by it. Which I guess makes me a big kid.

Oh, our pepper plants. My dad gave me a few young ones and I planted them and we actually got a few peppers out of one of them but they were sort of rotted and didn't get that big. Harumpf.


And here are some assorted flowers. Some native, some not. I have no idea what any of these are called. But some of them are pretty.

Like this one. I see this one and all I can think is, "Feed me, Seymour!"






I had to get on the hood of my car to get this whole thing in the frame. It eventually flowered. Last year it was about an eighth of this size. It actually has gotten bigger than this as the summer went on.



Cute lil roses. 


And these are Anna's rocks. She likes to find rocks by the house and put them on this cement slab we have in the middle of our back yard that's surrounded by day lilies on three sides.


And finally, Anna picking raspberries.