Outdoors Wednesday...

This morning was cooler than it has been, but I knew that wasn't going to last long, so I got out earlier than normal today to do a little weeding and trimming in my back yard. June is a weird month in my neck of the woods. Some mornings start out cool and overcast and then watch out...the sun breaks through and it's too hot to do much of anything in the yard. This plant above is called a Joey plant. It comes from Australia. It likes dry weather I'm told so I knew it would be perfect in my yard. The main reason I bought it though is because of the name. My older son is Joseph, but I call him Joey. He's been Joey to me since he came home on his first day of kindergarten and told me his name was no longer Joseph. He was now Joey. I thought that was cute and it stuck. So of course I had to have a Joey plant and I bought one for his house too!
This is a trailing coleus. It is new to my garden and went in next to the Hostas.

This is a new one too. It is called Brumble. I liked the variegation on the leaves and it also went in with the Hostas, although it said it likes shade and sun. Anything that says that goes in the shade in my yard. Summer is just too hot!


I got these petunias a while back. I don't normally fall for petunias. They get too leggy for my tastes, but the color on this one was so pretty with the lime green outlining the pink. They are in a pot on my back porch. They are quite happy there.




My apple tree is very full right now and the apples are getting pretty big. In a few weeks I will start picking them and making pies to freeze. The branches are so heavy now even though we have thinned out the apples. Don and I pick off the small ones just about every day, otherwise the branches will break. We had it professionally trimmed for the first time last year. He took so many branches out and said we need to do that every other year. We had been doing it ourselves for the past 25 years, but it is just getting too hard now.

It is a beautiful tree and gives us so much fruit and shade, but this time of year it is a lot of work and that is just one of the fruit trees in my yard. Right now it is full of birds. They won't touch the fruit until it is over ripe and we always leave some for them on the top branches. We have attracted many different types of birds because of this tree...even wild parrots who came to eat the fruit. Now that was fun!