We found so many fun things to do last week while we were house sitting for the kids. We were fortunate that almost everything we found to do had no cost - we paid $8 for one parking garage, and that was it. So many of the places we visited had beautiful flower gardens. I really enjoyed walking through them.
I do miss the flowers we had at the house. We had many plants that bloomed yearly - grape hyacinth, tulips, daffodils, wild violets, star of bethlehem, surprise lilies, elephant bush, morning glories. During our years there we also had lilacs, roses, snowball bush, and peonies. Most of those met their demise during upgrades to the house.
Every spring I would hit the garden center sales around Mother's Day and buy blossoming flowers to put in pots in the yard. In earlier years I would have hanging baskets on the front porch - once we put new siding on the house, I decided that keeping the siding in good shape was more important than hanging baskets. I always enjoyed petunias, impatiens, flowering moss - and when nothing else worked, I could always fall back on marigolds. I had such a soft spot for the flowers that were part of my life on the farm.
We had quite a large yard on the farm, so there was plenty of room for flowers. In the back yard where there had once been a small chickenhouse, Mom put in a flower garden that stayed pretty robust. There were all different kinds of flowers back there, but I have the strongest memory of orange oriental poppies.
There were a couple of rose of sharon bushes in the back yard, too. I remember the fun my cousins and I had pulling the blossoms off and playing with them - if you put two blossoms together at the stem end and held them together with a bobby pin, they would make a fancy southern lady. Who needed a doll to play with?
Dad was always having "good ideas". Sometimes they were - sometimes, not so much. When I was little, we had a milk truck that traveled the neighborhood and picked up milk from the farms with milk cows. Unlike today's large dairy farms, at that time a farmer could have a contract with the dairy and just sell a milk can or two of milk a week. It was a little extra income. Once the cows were milked, the milk was strained through a cloth, then put through a separator to separate the milk from the cream before being put in the milk can.
After we were no longer selling milk, Dad repurposed the cream separator into a flower planter. This was also in the back yard, usually filled with flowering moss. Along the north side of the house we had deep purple iris, and there were corn lilies along the road.
When I was small, Mom brought home a start for a lilac bush from one of Dad's aunts who lived in Coloma. That start was planted on the south side of the house, next to the cellar. That bush just grew and spread and had gorgeous fragrant blossoms. I loved it.
In the front yard we had more of Dad's "good ideas" - in front of the porch were four automobile tires that were filled with flowers.......and about halfway between the house and the edge of the yard were four more tires filled with flowers. These were good homes for petunias and marigolds, which came back year after year.
During my adolescent years I wanted to have my own flower garden. I picked out an assortment of flower seeds - probably from the Capper's Weekly paper or Grit magazine - and waited anxiously forthem to arrive. The folks helped me roughly measure off and get the flower bed ready. It was fun to watch the flowers come up and bloom - I enjoyed the pink cosmos, bachelor buttons, and asters. I don't remember what else was in that seed order, but I think there were about eight different varieties.
Of all the flowers we had in the yard, I think the sweet peas were Mom's favorite. Sweet peas resemble garden peas when they come up (and they would come up year after year), and ours were along the fence between the yard and the barn lot. The plants loved to climb up the fence, twining around the wire until they budded and bloomed. And when they bloomed, they were evidently a real taste treat - the cows loved reaching over the fence and eating them down to the ground. Rarely did we get to see the delicate pink blossoms for very long - those cows had great radar. And Mom had a pretty short fuse when it came to the cows and her sweet peas - the things she would say to and about those cows were never very complimentary.
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