Landscaping North side of house

I started the landscaping on the North side of the house last fall. I found a cement bench for $15! And many of the plants were on clearance. I cleared the area of the sod as best as I could with a manual sod cutter -- painful! A lot of work! Then I had a friend that brought me a bunch of dirt. I was so excited. He saved me quite a bit of money by laying down a nice foundation of dirt. I was able to get the plants in the ground last fall!

This spring I took up this project again... I purchased bags and bags and bags of dirt and found some really great prices on plants. Here is a picture facing West ... you can see on the side closest to the camera what the ground looked like before I started working on it this spring.
When I was taking this picture, I noticed something sitting on top of my electric box on the house.
I got closer to see what it was...it looked like a ceramic frog that must have been in my yard and somebody placed it up here ... and then... its lungs filled with air! It's alive!!! I screamed! lol

I brought the neighbor girls over to get a good look at it -- I was nonplussed, they weren't. "oh, yeah, that's a tree frog." A tree frog! I've never seen a tree frog before -- the girls left me in my wonder as I looked him over more closely. I decided we could be friends and he could stay sitting on my house. My house is green after all, he probably thought it was a tree....? ;)
I dug two deep holes and posted two fan styled trellises. (Clematis will be planted here.)
Here is a picture of many of the plants that have yet to get into the ground, and the bench that I got for $15! I also started pouring some of the mulch near the back of the landscaping since I was done working in that area. Eventually I will landscape this with rock, but the budget doesn't allow for that right now.
I dug a hole for a pond tub to be placed and added a lot of dirt to this section. I posted 4 brick stones toward the top and layered it with a flagstone and two brick stones to the side. I surrounded the pond with Ageratum. These purple plants are a natural deterrent of mosquitoes.
I then finished up the area around the bench, adding rubber stepping stones from the bench to the electric box. I then layered the dirt with mulch. The most challenging part of landscaping against the home is trying to keep at least a 6% grade so that water will still run off...without taking your plants with it!

Here is a picture of the stepping stones -- I found them on clearance last fall at Walmart. ($1 each -- regularly around $8 each.) The plant in the forefront is my Weiglia. I am so excited to watch this one grow. It will be a beautiful bush that will flower spring through fall. The leaves are a mix of burgundy and deep green and the flowers are fuchsia. Absolutely beautiful! Behind the stepping stone you can see my Blue Star Junipers. These will only get about 2-3 feet tall. That way the meter reader can still see the box. And the trellis in the background will block the view of the box from the street.In front of the Blue Junipers are Turtle plants (CHELONE) -- they get a deep green leaf and purple flowers resembling turle heads, from summer into fall. In between of those, I've planted Coleus, which are annuals but provide beautiful colors on their leaves. In the bottom right corner you can see my Hosta. I chose a bright yellow one to add more variety to the color scheme.

Behind the bench I planted some ground cover. (You can only barely see it here.) I can't remember its name, but its leaves are blue/green and will produce small white flowers in late summer. Eventually that will fill in much of the ground around the bench.
On the Northeast corner, I went a little bit crazy with my flowers. There is a mixture of annuals and perennials on this corner. Blue May Salvia in the back, closest to the pond will help hide the space where the down spout and drain pipe is buried. I have two yellow Yuccas in here and a yellow Coreopsis.
Here is a picture of my Kobold -- eventually the tips on this plant will produce big fluffy purple heads and will attract the butterflies!
I bordered the corner with bright pink geraniums. And I have Gerber Daisies scattered in here as well. (They are one of my favorite flowers because they produce color all season long!)Here is a shot of the North side of the house facing East.
On top of the cement flagstone, I put a frog spitter! You'll also notice some crescent stones inside of the pond. I tend to get live frogs jumping into my ponds and then they can't get back out. So, I have provided them with their own personal stepping stones. ;)

I have some rose moss planted on the top portion of the stones and eventually those will grow over, hiding the stones and the tubing/wiring to the pump.
Here are a couple of shots of my Nectarine tree that I planted last fall. I didn't think that it would produce this year, but there are small fruits all over the tree! I'm very excited to see how it will do this summer!

Graduation Cakes

I thought I'd try my hand at baking some graduation cakes this year. A friend asked me if I would make theirs -- they were graduating from the University of Iowa.

Here is a picture of my first attempt at working with fondant. Not so good! It was too dry -- and I realized if you go by the recipe exactly then you are spelling disaster. Fondant is more about feel than precise ingredient amounts.

I put the cake mix into a round bowl to create the bottom part of the mortar board. And then added a 10x10 cake pan for the top. It ended up being too heavy to work. I needed a cake board to support it. But in the end decided I would try something else.

My second attempt at the cakes was with a mortar board cake form. The fondant this time turned out MUCH better and much easier to work with. I didn't make a full batch and as you can see from the images below, I wasn't able to completely cover the cake. I liked this one ---but would probably need to trim the cake a bit more underneath to create more dramatic lines in the shape of the hat. In the end I didn't end up using this one either!

I decided that I enjoyed working with fondant but not necessarily as a cover for the cake. So I made two large sheet cakes (18x12x2), covered them in butter cream frosting and then decorated them with icing and fondant!
Once I had all of the icing and trim on the cake, I started to decorate. The first cake, I cut a hawkeye logo out of yellow fondant adn placed on the cake. Initially, I was going to make a black icing oval on the butter cream icing and then put the logo on top of that to make it pop more -- but then I realized I didn't have much icing left and I didn't want to chance it. In the process, I ended up making a little bit of a mess of the white icing -- not as smooth in the background as I would have liked -- but at least the logo looks good! :)
On the second cake I decorated with a plastic mortar board. I also changed the trim from yellow on the top and black on the bottom.
I decided to add a little more trim around the mortar board.
I rolled a diploma from yellow fondant, and added black icing for the bow.

I wrote Congrats Dawn with the star tipped icing bag. I was running out of time. I wanted to change the tip in my icing bag so that I could top the star tipped yellow lettering with a straight line tip in black icing -- which would have cleaned up the lettering and made it pop more...but in the end this worked out.


Here are some images from the buffet meal served at the graduation -- thanks to the help of Scott, and Sheena! I couldn't have finished it all without you!

RHYS

I have a new buddy!! We have been together for about a month now and we are getting along famously. :) He came to me with the name Rhys and I have kept it.

Here are some shots of him when he first came home.







He enjoys his daily walks -- even after a crazy blizzard! The snow was piled so high that the sidewalks were like a maze of snow.






...And sometimes we'd run out of sidewalk! I was walking with my hood up and my head down and sometimes I'd pin us in and not know until we got there. That made for some really long treks in the snow!


Here is a small clip of the tricks that Rhys has learned! Such a smart boy! :)