Ready, Set, GO!

I love a good bargain and consider myself lucky to find these 2 matching Princess cars with new batteries on an online auction for less than the price of one replacement battery. Brooklyn spent a couple days at Grandpa & Grandma's house this week and really enjoyed driving them around, especially when her cousin, Bailey, came to visit.

I also want to thank everyone who responded to my online survey as well the phone calls & "in person" requests to keep the blog going. The results tallied as follows:
Should I continue blogging?
Yes, continue to come and share the garden of life and life in the garden: 43
Yes, but only share photography and not my family: 3

If I continue to blog would you like to see the blog expand into different directions?
Yes, please share all of your interests and pursuits (garden, crafts, recipes, decorating, traveling, photography, digital scrapbooking and of course family): 40
Yes, please combine your old food blog and continue to share recipes and table settings: 3
No, stay as is: 2

If I continue to blog how often would you like to see me blog?
I'll take what I can get - if you post it I will come: 38
Once a week: 3
Three times a week or more: 3

With those encouraging results from all of you,  I hope to get back to blogging on a regular basis and have been brainstorming some ideas on what I want to share.  I've been so busy this summer that other than taking photos of my family, I haven't hardly picked up a camera.  Crazy right?  Especially for a gal that took 100s of photos a week just of birds :)  To get me back into the photography/blogging mode I am going to participate in the October 365 Photo Challenge List.  I've already printed out the list of 31 prompts and look forward to seeing how I manage to interpret some of them especially number 18. Patient.

For today, I leave you with some more photos of the little princesses playing with their new cars at Grandma's house.

should I stay or should I go?

I hope anyone reading this is having a wonderful September! Please help me out by completing the survey at the end of this post.

wordless Wednesday...

one...

We just love this little princess so much and can't wait to celebrate with her today and at her big party on Saturday!

I'm back...

I'm back from a wonderful vacation with these two princesses...

and their parents. We had a wonderful time and met a beautiful baby boy for the first time...can you guess where we were? I'll be back with more photos and the location of our trip after I catch up a bit.

Lady slippers & other wildflowers...

I've lived out on the MN prairie my entire life, it's farm country and the only "woods" are the farmstead groves, so I was thrilled to spend our long holiday weekend camping in the northwoods of MN. An even bigger thrill was seeing all the pink lady slippers in bloom on our cycle rides. On Friday, we crossed the border into Canada at Baudette, MN and rode the backroads of Ontario up to Nestor Falls. One of the roads turned into gravel about 35 miles in so we had to slow our pace down and really enjoy the scenery and I was surprised to see such big bushes of wild roses as well as so many lady slippers.

I got a good start on conquering my fear of working in the garden and have a few of the pathways and other areas weeded. So much is blooming now that I would love to take photos but it has been a windy couple of days. I'll have to do a end of July garden tour (if I can get the weeds taken care of by then).

July cuties...

mosaic Monday...fireworks

I hope everyone reading this had a wonderful long holiday weekend! We sure did and while I catch up in the office today, I thought I would share a few mosaics of the fireworks we attended on July 3rd.

We spent two of our 4 days of holiday time on the road traveling to Waskish, MN on Upper Red Lake. It was an almost 6 hour drive each way but the two days we spent cycling in the Chippewa National Forest and Canada were well worth the drive. More photos on that tomorrow.

Granddaughters and garden woes...

I can't believe a place I used to love to come to almost daily (this blog) has fallen to the wayside. Life just gets busy sometimes and that's the only excuse I have :) In the meantime here are a few mosaics of my beautiful granddaughters for my family and friends to see...

I was lucky to spend a few days up north with Brooklyn last week. We had a "girls" day on Thursday complete with a picnic at Leif Erickson park overlooking Lake Superior and a drive up to Two Harbors while she napped in her carseat and grandma enjoyed the views. Then we stopped to watch a big ship docking and finally had a few hours of fun at a big playground.

I am very thankful that little Miss Bailey lives locally and I get to see her several times a week. She has her own little playground and pool in her yard so it is fun to see her play there. She is now 11 months old and walking all over the place!

I haven't been out in the garden for weeks and I'm disappointed to say that it is the weediest it has been since I began gardening. My former joy in gardening has been taken over by fear of snakes. It seems I have an infestation of garter snakes this year and I know they cannot hurt me but that doesn't stop them from scaring the bejibbers out of me when I am suddenly startled by one! I can let out a good scream even when I am home alone and it takes a good 15 minutes for my heart rate to return to normal :)

WARNING TO ANYONE SCARED OF SNAKES A PHOTO IS NEXT!

I am seeing them in the pond as I assume they are eating fish eggs or baby fish since I haven't seen any live baby fish yet this year. I find them on rocks around the pond and especially around the big rock fountain. They crawl across paths I am walking on and the last straw was when one was in my fairy garden...Yikes, I'm crying Uncle. I've purchased every last container of a product called "Snake Away" from the shelves of a local farm store and I haven't spotted any for 3 days so maybe it is working! As part of my year of renewal I am going to try and overcome my irrational fear and put my "big girl pants" on next week and get back to the garden. I'm motivating myself to overcome my snake phobia with some of these quotes found on pinterest...

He said it more than once...

Let's hope I can get myself cured of definition 1 so that I can choose option 2 and start enjoying life in the garden again.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of this holiday week. We have fun things planned starting with a local fireworks show tonight already and then some days of cycle riding. I'll be back next week, hopefully showing off a weeded garden...wish me luck!

mosaic Monday...garden shots

I finally am seeing COLOR in the garden this week!  In these parts my peonies and lilacs usually bloom around Memorial Day and I am finally enjoying the sweet scent of lilacs in the garden this week.  The first of the garden peonies is in full bloom and I expect the others will soon follow suit as all are sporting huge buds.  The iris are also all blooming.

I planted this perennial poppy 2 years ago and this year was the first to have multiple blossoms. Such a striking color compared to the orange ones I grew up with.

Yarrow, loosestrife and blue flax add more color.

I had several clematis die after our long winter and the remaining ones (even group 2's) have had to regrow from the roots and not previous stems. Dianthus and roses add more pretty pinks to the backyard.

I added 2 coral peonies in the fall of 2011 and this year I have the first buds opening. Gorgeous!

mosaic Monday...

With this unusual Minnesota spring my garden is very "green" looking with a noticeable lack of blooms for the calendar reading June 10th.
 
The last of the tulips are blooming as well as the last fern peony, the alliums are in full blossom. The garden peonies are still budding and I have my first lone clematis. The first iris are starting to open and all should be blooming later this week as well as the shasta daisies.
It seems like it has been gray and raining every other day for a month! This weekend was no exception but we decided to go camping with our daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter anyways. Friday was just plain gray but the sun managed to peak out now and then on Saturday. We rented a pontoon on Saturday for an afternoon on the lake. It was awesome to watch 2 bald eagles and several osprey fishing on the small lake with us! One bald eagle caught a fish right behind the parked pontoons as we were getting ready to leave.   Brooklyn enjoyed the ride and even napped an hour on my lap before getting her second wind and trying her own luck at fishing with mommy's pole.  Jeff & I can't remember the last time we were out on a lake so this afternoon was a real treat.
Along with watching the eagles and osprey catching fish we also got to watch several loons fishing near our pontoon. I didn't realize they spent so much time diving under water. There are no photos because I was holding Brooklyn but we also witnessed a pair of loons following a mother duck and her ducklings. The mother duck would fly back to the loons and "fight" them with lots of wing maneuvers and splashing from both birds. One duckling couldn't keep up and we were worried the loon would get him but thanks to the mother duck coming back to the loons several times he managed to rejoin the group.

Since we've had so much rain lately our campsite was soggy so Brooklyn rocked her rain boots all weekend. She even managed to find a mud puddle and do some major splashing in which left her cute yellow pants looking like they were dark brown polka dotted :) Saturday night and Sunday brought much more rain so we had to pack up and leave in pretty hard rain. It was a good thing Grandma wasn't wearing yellow pants or they would have been polka dotted too.
 
More on our camping weekend if you are interested on Jayme's Blog.

Rebecca asked in the Pine Hollow 2013 post the approximate size of the fairy garden..It is about 8' x 10'

Pine Hollow 2013...

Welcome to the spring tour of Pine Hollow, the little fairy village that lives under the Pine Lady in my backyard.   Let's take a walk around the village and see the changes that have been made from last year.  In the photo below we see the back views of the Rose Cottage and the new horse barn added for 2013.
Next up is another view from the edge of the garden showing the "park" portion of the village (explanations to come later in this post).

Moving in for closer views we see that the Rose Cottage is now surrounded by a picket fence, has an expanded patio and our resident dogs have moved into their own dog house.

Jeff & I built a barn for the Hollow's resident horse using scrap lumber and pieces salvaged from a thrift store birdhouse.

To the left of the new barn begins the park portion of the village with lots of spots for rest and reflection including the asian pagoda and black reflecting pool.  Wildlife is frequently spotted here.
 
 

The village is centered around the Pine Lady and a quaint little home in the trunk.  A second story addition is in the early stages and should be finished soon.

Nearby is a gazebo and...
 
several places to sit by the stream to watch the birds and rest.
There is a children's playhouse area in the park near the reflecting pool and
a gazebo and stage for nightly concerts in the park.
The stage is new this year after the initial success of piano concerts in 2012.  :)
 

Also in the park is the glass tea house, a perfect place to relax by the waterfall and also listen to the nearby concerts.
 

 
The pool and hot tub remain a popular place to spend a hot afternoon especially now that they have added a pool pavilion fully stocked with cool drinks and snacks.

Finally we come full circle and end up at the potting house in front of the Rose Cottage.
 

I hope you enjoyed your tour, while I have added a few special fairy garden accents purchased from a nursery this spring the majority of my garden still is composed of thrift store and garage sale finds which are repurposed into garden objects.
You can also see that I live in an area with a high concentration of iron in the water and many things are sporting and "orange" cast to them from frequent waterings from my sprinklers. It's a dead give away to what is new and what has been there. Someday soon I'll do a post on the plants in Pine Hollow, many are perennial but I like to add a few annuals for the "trees" each year. I'm linking up to Fishtail Cottage for her Garden Party #6 (beautiful gardens showcased this week!) and The Magic Onions which is truly a magical place to view fairy gardens for going on 4 years now. After viewing the 2013 entries make sure you click on the Fairy Gardens tab to view gardens from previous years.