The Other Garden

I am finally convinced that spring is really here. And she brought tulips.

I've been working on my flower beds for 10 years. They're far from done, but I have some pretty flowers each year. I cleaned the beds up this morning and took some pictures of my tulips while I was at it. Since I don't have anything new to show in the vegetable garden yet, I thought I'd share my tulips.

 

This is what those orange and yellow stripy ones look like inside:

Then there are these:

A little closer:

And inside:

You may have noticed that they're all orange. That's because they're in my orange garden. The pink tulips in my pink garden aren't blooming yet. They actually don't look so good. I think the sleet, hail, and freezing nights got to them.

Yes, I said I have an orange garden and a pink garden. When I first started with the flower beds, my goal was to have a whole bed that was nothing but orange flowers. That wasn't so easy 10 years ago. There weren't a lot of orange perennials at the garden centers or in the catalogs. These days, it's easier, but the orange bed is still not done.

Limiting my garden to one color helped me not go crazy buying flowers every year. The problem was, looking for orange, I couldn't always find something, so I decided it was time for another color. A few years ago, I expanded my flower bed and created the pink area. Pink flowers are much easier to find, and if all grows well, it should be fairly full this year. There's just enough room for some annuals. I have to leave room for annuals, so I have an excuse to go to the garden centers and buy something every spring.

I'm planning to plant carrots and beets tomorrow. I'm trying something really cool with the carrots that I'll share.

Saturday's birds: house finch, robin, grackle, downy woodpecker, cardinal, chickadee, mourning dove, house sparrow, bluejay.