Views From The Garden

I had a visitor in my garden yesterday. This giant butterfly was happily making his way from flower to flower, inspecting the zinnias and cosmos along the way.

He's huge! I really loved this lime green zinnia this year. They've done surprisingly well when you consider they've had to contend with sixty-five pounds of puppy tromping through the garden on a daily basis.

My plan to fill in the bare spots with flowers grown from seed worked pretty well. I still had to weed every week to keep the thistle out, but this corner has greatly improved since last year.

The garden runs along the back of our yard, with a fence separating our corner lot from the neighbors behind us. I show you the nicely cropped photos most of the time so that you can't see what is essentially our view of the neighbors trash pile that we are treated to on a daily basis.

Sigh, Yesterday was actually one of the better days, as the three overflowing garbage cans were already at the curb for garbage pick up day. Apparently, when you own a three car garage, there's just no room left for garbage. On windy days, it just blows into our yard. On other days, they sometimes just toss it over the fence. Nice.

I try not to let it bother me, but this is what I see when I wash the dishes or sit at the table with with a cup of coffee in the morning.

Next month, we plan on purchasing about ten of the tallest arbor vitae we can find to plant at the back fence to try to hide this view. Hopefully, they will be mature enough to camouflage the garbage when we put the house on the market in the spring.

In the meantime, I've decided that I really cannot look at it from the kitchen table for one more day. This was the solution I came up with:

Half closed blinds. I can see Jemma at ground level, but it blocks my view of everything else.

Denial is always a great strategy. Ha ha ha! In the meantime, we continue to work on the inside of the house, finishing the staining and painting jobs that still need to get crossed off the To Do list. Just a few more months, and this Fixer Upper house should be finished and ready for its new owners.