Gardening triumphs

Remember the garden designed to camouflage the satellite dish?  It's looking awesome, with only minor additions of some annuals each year.  This year we're doing wave petunias, full-sized snapdragons, and a lantana that's been trained as a standard.  

It's soooo cool - I've never seen one that shape before, and now it's in my front yard!  Huzzah!

Also cool is the number of things that survived last year despite all of my best (worst?) efforts.  For example, there's the 10 clumps of black-eyed susans that I transplanted from my neighbor's garden ... when they were in full bloom ... in July ... when it was like 95 degrees and I didn't have the bed ready for them yet.  Yeah, that was a good idea!  But they all managed to straggle back this year, so any bunnies in the neighborhood should be fully fed and happy this summer.

There's not much going on the in the vegetable garden yet ... today was the official date of last frost for our zone, so I haven't bothered to mess with it much yet.  But the oregano that survived the winter is happy.  Anybody want to come make lots and lots and lots of pizza sauce?

And finally, on my list of "holy crap, how did I do that?" triumphs, we have the jack-in-the-pulpit plant that I bought at great expense last year, watched sit there and be sullen for most of the summer, let go to seed, had a hard time finding this spring, found out that they're hard to naturalize in gardens and I might have to replant them this year, and all of the sudden there were four of them last week.  Yay, me!

I've got a lot more planned to add this year, including a giant new bed at the back of the property which STILL hasn't emerged from its waterlogged status enough that I can start amending it, much less plant anything, and some overgrown and under-planned beds we inherited with the house that need some major rearranging and/or trashing.  Should be fun!