My Happy Place

I love winter, but I love,LOVE, love summers in Summit County. The cool, yet warm crisp air, the always flowing breeze, the green aspen leaves and the wild flowers. Oh, I love it so much. We have a really short summer and a non existent spring. This year the summer is even shorter because of all the snow we had. It's finally almost completely melted out of our yard, thank goodness, and I can get out in the yard and start working in my gardens.

I love gardens and flowers. They make me smile. My ideal day is working in my yard for at least three hours each day. It's where I'm happiest this time of the year. The first thing I do when I wake up is walk over to my large window in my bedroom and look out over my lawn. (I have a serious problem with voles eating my grass, more about that another day) Then, I come downstairs, make a cup of coffee and walk around my house checking all my flower beds. (We have a problem with a bear. We have a fox who visits the house daily. We also have a neighborhood moose.) I want to make sure none of my plants got smashed during the night. Then, throughout the day, I simply just go outside and look around. It's odd to some people, but not to me. Fortunately for me, my next door neighbor is an avid gardener herself, so she doesn't make fun of me when she sees me just staring at my grass. Or make fun of me because of my gardening boots. (She has a very similar pair)

Last summer was our first summer in our house. We had purchased the house in October, late fall the year before. We previewed the house a few times during August but didn't really pay attention to what plants there were in the gardens. I knew the lawn was a disaster. Good thing I took tons of photos while we walked around on one of our showings. Last year, I had no idea what to expect from my garden.

Back patio and waterfall (not working)

Overgrown Perennial Garden

Weeds instead of grass

Last summer, my first task was to clean out all the flower beds and to shape them into something more manicured. I also went on a crazy, "I MUST HAVE GRASS" trip and pulled weeds for hours each day, fertilized, filled in holes and mowed. It paid off because by the end of the summer, I had my grass.

Granted, it still needs work. My goal is to have it look like grass on a golf course. But, it's grass none the less. People who live at lower elevations do not understand how difficult it is to grow grass at 10,000 feet elevation. It takes hours of work each day. Seriously!

Last year we put in 6 lilac bushes. They didn't do too well through the winter, but have buds nonetheless.  We'll have to see how they do in a few weeks.

The grass is slowly coming back. I seeded and fertilized last fall right before the snow came. I have little grass shoots coming up daily so it's growing. It's green, but has some bare spots where snow was stored all winter long. It will take time, but I'll have my nice lawn.

Other projects I'm working on: Resorting the water falls in the back patio area. That's going to be a 2 summer long project so it warrants a blog post by itself.

~~No news on the adoption front. We are just in a waiting stage...