Saturday

Sorry, no pictures today. I've set the ornaments aside momentarily, in favor of starting a larger project I've been taking a little heat for not starting yet on one of my yahoo! groups. It's The Old West, by Little House Needleworks. I haven't gotten much stitched on it yet, perhaps I'll make some identifiable progress on it today and post a progress piccie later on. I'm stitching it on a terracotta colored piece of evenweave found deep in the dark confines of my fabric stash bin. The fabric is exactly the color of the clay and sand in my front flower beds, which I spent much of this week disturbing in order to plant new pretties.

That's been my main focus this week, planting new pretties. This will be my first experience with desert gardening, but so far it's been successful. Okay, so it's not even broken 100 for temperatures yet, but it is dry as a bone down here and I frequently find myself watering twice a day. I've found that most plants that liked full sun in my Arkansas garden appreciate quite a bit of shade here in the desert. Surprise surprise! My herbs, as usual, are thriving, and Emily's strawberries are having a bumper season, so much so that I told her next year we'll buy a flat or more of young plants. They just keep blooming!

My back yard is almost "done", which is a good thing since we'll be having parties back there this year. The good thing about living here is that you can be comfortably outdoors pretty much all season long. We are big outdoor people, so we find that a huge plus. I like the back yard to be like an extra room in the house, so hubby spends a large portion of his "free" time trimming grass, fertilizing, and helping me with larger garden projects. Today, we are tackling the rose bushes. They are well established, but the beds need cleaning out and the bushes themselves need to be fertilized and trimmed up a bit. They seem to continually flower, the more I deadhead the more they bloom!

More to come later.