Located beneath the deck and behind a large hedge grows a  flower garden.  Drenched by the rain fall in winter, dried hardened clay in the summer, wind blasted during the spring and fall – this has been a challenge area for our family to maintain.

It serves as a walkway of sorts from the basement to the lake.

Then extension that grows away from the deck can be seen by our neighbor’s deck during their BBQ’s.  We try to keep this section pretty for their guests, though we are seldom in this part of the garden.

This does happen to be my view from my bedroom window – a beautiful way to start the day.

Working on the ‘deck garden’ has helped us to see the baby ducks more often this week.  We have two families of baby mallards and two families of goslings.  There should be more swimming around as June comes closer.

This is our next area to tackle.  This Rhodie needs a bit of cleaning up. When we first moved in, we had about 4-5 blooms, and it has grown each year.  This whole corner of the property needs some maintenance, it will be our next project. 

This is where we spend most of our time.  Baseball, football, water balloons, lawn chairs, beach blankets. 

This has been cleaned up even more since this shot. I took some advice to put down newspapers and card board and then put mulch on top. I am hoping that it will work, confident that it will. Then I can focus on maintaining the edges and weeds under the shrubs.  The boys helped me to cut the papers/cardboard and to dump the mulch, rake it around and clear out blackberries.

The last 3 summers we have grown tomatoes and zucchinis on top of the deck. Darren had a different idea for this year to grow the plants in these large swim tubs.  Set on Cardboard and then on pallets we are hoping that the slugs will not find them interesting. It will also make it easier to clean up in the fall.  This section of the deck is directly under the stairs an has been our compost dirt area.  When the last tomato freezes off, we’ll dump the dirt back under the stairs, clean up the pallets and haul the swimming pools to the dump or store for next year.

We have been weed eating and trimming the hedges more since this shot. Maybe I should take photos once a week of our gardens. It shows where things can be cleaned up more, and shows our progress to me. This year the boys have been a huge help in getting the property ready for summer.

There are so many spots on this property with little mini gardens. I just keep going in a circle to trim, weed, water, and enjoy the plants. Many of the plants, I do not know the names, I will work this summer to learn more.

Join us this month at the Outdoor Hour Challenge as we focus on the Gardens – http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/2013/05/outdoor-hour-challenge-focus-on-garden.html

(We are renting a family home, built my Milton and Marilyn in the 1940’s.  There is a hand carved sign hanging above the mail box that reads MIL-MAR – we call our home Camp Mil Mar.)