Around the House - Flowers, Food and More

Although I have much more to cover as regards our short trip to Laurel Mississippi and beyond, I thought that I should pause in that series and interject a bit of home related beauty and action, some of which would be totally outdated if I waited another month to publish the photos…

The top photo is of one of four drift roses in Laurie's front circle bed.

 

This photo is of of side rock garden bed with weigela, forsythia

 and a wild rose bush. 

Excitement!  One morning Laurie heard some truck noise out front and when she looked, we had quite a line-up of vehicles and people in front of the lot to the right of our home.   They were there to handle a problem that we’d noted a couple of months earlier.

Looking through the woods next to us, you can see the dead branches toward the top of a big ash tree.  We’d spotted the dead tree in early spring and noted that it was leaning toward our house…and was tall enough to hit it!  Fortunately, the lot is owned by the POA and not an individual.  So no hassle was necessary.  We called the POA and they came out and marked the tree for removal…

It was quite a production!  Ropes attached to a front loader to ensure that the tree would fall in the right direction…not toward our home….and a sizable crew, plus someone's youngster.  One guy’s girlfriend even showed up to watch the action.  There was a huge crash and down it came!  This was the second tree that we’ve had to ask the POA to remove.  The first one, a truly giant ironwood tree, was even bigger.

Here’s a photo from the same angle as the first…and there aren’t any dead branches visible.  Success!!  Potential disaster averted...

This is a street side view showing the aftermath of the tree being felled.

A week or two later, one could clearly see the problem with that big ash tree.  This view from our front porch shows just how rotten the tree was on the inside…

Now it’s time for a bit of food…home style.

We tend to go for simple meals and this plate with 4 different types of cheese, accompanied by a baguette sliced into cheese size pieces, constituted our dinner one night.  Of course our first step was buttering the bread using our Amish butter…just a bit more of a plus for our repast…

Laurie usually likes her breakfast small and simple.  In this case, its vanilla lite Greek yogurt with granola we bought from a local Mennonite market and some fresh strawberries.

Then there is my version of breakfast… In this case, once again we had some leftover mashed potatoes I had to do something with.  So I sliced up a leftover beer bratwurst, browned it in the frying pan and set it aside.  Then I browned up the leftover mashed potatoes…adding in a couple handfuls of shredded sharp cheddar cheese.

When the color was right…maximizing all the flavor possible, I topped my concoction with a couple of easy over eggs.  Truly a satisfying breakfast!

We love our oak leaf hydrangeas.  Fittingly they reside under the big oak tree in our back yard.  We do coddle the hydrangeas…as that big tree tends to shelter them from necessary rainfall in the heat of summer.  

Laurie recently filled our front planters with an assortment of annuals.  They really brighten up the entry to our front porch…

We have two magnolia trees in our front yard.  These are the “Little Gem” variety.  Their maximum height is reputed to be 20 feet.  Both of ours should stop growing as they are both, at or above the max height!  The magnolia flowers…which just seem to keep on coming…are truly glorious and smell like lemons!

Laurie just took this photo of our circular front flower bed.  This is just about at its most colorful for the year!

I’ll end this post with a photo we took the other day when we were cruising the neighborhood to check out the many homes under construction.  With her ‘critter detector super vision’, Laurie spotted this 6-point buck lying down in the woods just looking back at us.  He's in his velvet phase.  Very nice!  It’s becoming rarer and rarer for us to see deer in our neighborhood.  It’s the price of progress I guess… 

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave