First roses of the year

Morden Centennial (Morden series)

Lambert Closse ('modern' Explorer series)

These are the first roses that have bloomed this year. There are lots of buds in progress so there will be a nice showing, or at least, we hope so.

Creatures around us

This is the big fat groundhog that lives in the rocks in the front of our house. We think he may be the one eating some of Freda's flowers but aren't too sure. (Photo taken June 9th, 2009.)

This is a photo of 6 American Goldfinches, I just love these pretty birds. (Photo taken June 12th, 2009.)

Tired puppy dog

Tawny crashed on Sunday - Freda took the dogs for two swims on Saturday, and they had another two on Sunday plus a medium-length walk (it started raining). Tawny is a middle aged dog now (she was 6 in March) and she doesn't have the same 'go for hours' energy she used to have.


This is the view towards our house from the road. I haven't been able to keep a path regularly trimmed in the back 40 because of the headaches I have all the time.

Finally, a nice spring day

It's been cool and quite rainy lately, except for a freak day where it got to over 30C! These are some of Freda's flower gardens in the back yard, but this is her new peony - a General MacMahon. It's a stunner!

This flower bed is anchored by an unusual pink lilac at one end and some peonies at the other end (not yet in bloom, sorry).


The plant in the big pot is called a heliotrope, and it smells wonderful. Freda describes it as "grape". This pot is right by the deck so we hope that we will be able to smell it when we are sitting on the deck. The little dog family seems to enjoy the heliotrope too. Did you notice the rusty rock at the bottom right of the photo? It must have a lot of iron in it.


This was an unusual colour combination for a pansy.

Grass cut pano

Pano June 2, 2009
This pano (23 photos) shows the grass was just cut today. The grass was over knee-height in some areas so was not fun to walk through, especially if there had been a recent rain...


Freda is having fun playing in the dirt with her flowers.

Strange weather

The weather was very strange today. I managed to get the front lawn and back yard mowed before it started raining. After the rain stopped and the grass had dried off a bit, it was very cold. As I took the push mower out to trim around the trees and the fence, I felt some little rocks hitting my head. I turned around to see who was doing that and realized that we were getting a round of hail!! The hail didn't last too long but the cold weather stayed around. Later, Freda went out to do some planting, and you can see she is wearing her coat while doing that.

Yes, it's a bird nesting

Well, it looks like a bird is nesting up in the shelter of our post. We think it's one of the robins that we've seen around here on the lawn and attacking its reflection, but haven't got a close enough view of it yet. Now it makes me wonder if the broken robins' eggs that we saw recently (see May 16th post) were accidental or deliberate by another bird trying to take the nest over. Hmmmm....

Sorry for the lousy photo. We've had some windy rainy days and our windows are all dirty now.

Robins are stupid (and a tiny frog)

I took this sequence of photos this afternoon. I was hearing a knock on the window about once every minute or so. So I peeked out the window (the curtains were drawn to prevent bird kill) and saw this robin attacking it's reflection in the window. This went on for a very long time time, so I can only conclude that robins are stupid.

The photos are a bit blurry, sorry.


This tiny frog was sitting on the brickmold by a window. The black horizonal line in the photo is the window seal and the green is the brickmold, which is about 2 inches square. So that means the frog is about 2 inches long (just guessing) and less than an inch wide.

I hope he eats a lot of mosquitoes. :)

Visit to the vet's in Carleton Place

We took both Tawny and Taz to the vet's yesterday. Tawny had her annual checkup (passed with flying colours) and Taz had to be weighed so he could get the right dosage of the heartworm preventive medication. Taz now weighs 104 lbs and Tawny checks in at a hefty 85 lbs.

While Freda was in the vet's office with Tawny, I took Taz out for a walk to get him away from all the other dogs (he likes to be dominant and is also very vocal). I snapped this photo with my camera phone. I got Taz to jump on the railway handcar display and snapped this photo -- you can see the fuzziness caused by my finger at the bottom edge of the photo. Oops.

A beautiful day for gardening

Saturday pano (sorry for the missing pieces) from 30 photos

Today was a busy gardening day. While Freda was putting together the big pots (see two big square planters at bottom right-center), Mark was doing the lawn, which meant dethatching, then aerating, then over-seeding with grass seed. I had to keep some seed back for the places that we are putting in as new grass areas.


These are Freda's big planters. You can see in the background that the pile of topsoil is gradually diminishing. Still a lot to do. Some of the topsoil will be sed for top-dressing the lawn in the bare areas and the rest will be used for creating the new lawn area on the north side of the house.