June 12th, 2011

I have no idea why, but as I get older I enjoy watching birds out of the window more and more.  Is bird watching enthusiasm directly linked with age?  Well anyway, we’ll sideline that topic for another day.  My favorite bird to watch is hummingbirds.  We get quite a few of them in our area and over the years I’ve dedicated an area of our flower garden to lure hummingbirds July-September. 

 

This is right outside our playroom window, so the girls and I can watch the hummingbirds easily.  In a couple weeks, there will be more red blooms, but it’s getting there.  I put down a hummingbird seed mix.  Mostly what grew from it were these.

I don’t know the name of these flowers, but there is a nice little patch of them ready!  They do look like something a hummingbird would be tempted to stick its little beak in.

I have always been intimidated by trellis flowers.  How does the flower know where the trellis is?  Then how does it know where to go on the trellis?  What if the trellis is knocked down in a storm and leaves the flowering vine homeless?  This year my mom and dad bought me 2 cute trellises at a going out of business sale.  I love them.  At our old house on the hill our neighbor had this vine going all around her fence.  It makes these beautiful purple flowers and pods.  My mom grabbed a couple of pods trying to grow her own, but it didn’t work.  I was at our local garden store and saw a picture on a seed packet that looked like that flowering vine and started the seeds indoors.  I cannot believe it worked. 

I was worried, they only give you 7 seeds.  I got five emerging plants, I kept 3 and gave my mom 2.

Hopefully it’ll look something like this.  I’m bummed it’s an annual.

But apparently you keep the pods and just plant them the next year.

Playing in the yard is a favorite pastime.  But this year my summer is served with a big heaping side of cicadas.  They. Are. Everywhere.  At least in our neck of the woods.  Softball practices, pool (one day I counted 16 that I had to peel off my body), grocery stores, bowling alley, you name it, they’re there with their ugly red eyes.  I am now taking pretty pictures of plants and listening to the cicadas make out quite noisily.

Stupid cicada in my hummingbird garden.  There were tons, but this guy gets the blog cameo.

Stupid cicadas.  The birds eat them like popcorn in our yard.  Thankfully the girls LOVE them.  Sydney will save them in the pool and put them on the side where they will fly and land in my ear screeching.  Then she’ll fill up a bucket with dead ones and carry it around.  Little weirdo.

Our local bakery is decorating our cookies with “cicadas.”

Mums in our front yard.  How many cicadas do you see?  I have counted 15.  Ew.

Thankfully they are gone now.  When we were in the thick of the cicadas I kept thinking, they will soon go away.  One day there were less, not more, and I knew we were on the downhill.  Wednesday I was walking Lauren and Sydney to Lauren’s softball practice, she looked around, and said “Mommy, the cicadas are gone!”  “Yes and they won’t be back for 13 years, you will be in college then.” “Oh, by then I’ll have a boyfriend.”  And there you have it.