The vegetable garden in the backyard is coming right along. Yesterday, I planted the cukes and zucchini in the small square bed, and added the metal trellis. This afternoon, I put in the bamboo and string lines, which is what I’ll use to train the vines, since the metal will get too hot for them. One cuke seedling has taken a beating, and I’m not sure it will recover.

This is part of the shade bed in the front yard that I’ve been working on. The buttefly iris was one enormous plant that I splurged on yesterday, knowing I could divide it in two or three. I went for two, because it was hard as hell to get it to split, and I didn’t want to risk damaging the plants any further than I did. I’m not sure I’m quite settled on the placement of all the elements yet. The bird bath may move forward tomorrow, to allow the iris to spread behind it. Oh, and I suppose it would also be nice if I put the stupid shutters up. I took down the old, nasty wood ones that were all rotted last year, and the new vinyl ones have been sitting in the garage since then. The house looks much cuter with white shutters on either side of the windows.

The flowers on the iris started opening today, and they’re so pretty! I sort of bought this one blind, since all I could see were white buds. Lo and behold, they have purple centers, which is lovely, since they will soon have purple Mexican petunias in front of them.

Three little ground ivy plants I bought today, waiting to go into the same shade bed.