One of my favorite parts of our new house is that there is a yard. Yesterday morning I spent an hour and half outside enjoying the warm weather and sunshine while supervising the cat. (She loves to run and play in the yard, much to the chagrin of the neighborhood squirrels, but I don’t trust her to stay inside the fence when left to her own devices.) We do this with each day when the weather is nice. Wondering around the yard gives me a good opportunity to think about how to improve it through gardening.
We have our five little beds that should be ready for planting vegetables in the coming weeks, and while I’m still deciding what to plant and where, I’ve been thinking more about the rest of the yard. Our house has absolutely no curb appeal.
This is the left side of our house, which has been a rental house for at least the last ten years. There is no landscaping–of course all the grass is dead right now, but that patch of dirt next to the foundation runs all along the house, and was like that when we moved in last November when there was still just a hint of life left in the yard.
Since we moved in in late November, I didn’t plant any bulbs in these places like I wanted to, because I figured it would be too late. I figured we do some petunias or something, maybe some wildflowers later in the summer, and plant some tulips and gladiolus earlier in the fall for next year.
Imagine my surprise when I noticed this little bit of greenery coming up just to the left of the drainpipe in the photo above.
Two little patches of some sort of bulb! These look to me like they’ve been neglected for a few years, and probably should have been thinned last year, so I’m hoping they still flower, because until they do, I have no idea what they are. I’m thinking hyacinth or narcissus from the shape of the leaves, but I could be totally wrong.
And then to the right of the drainpipe, I found these little guys who look like they must have just popped up through the soil. They’re different from the others, but I’m still not sure what kind of bulb they are. My guess is crocus, but really, I know nothing about flowers, other than I’m really excited that I don’t have to wait until next year for spring blooms.
ETA: They turned out to be day lilies and daffodils!