Belated Weekend Recap

Hola peeps and happy Tuesday.  Anyone else get engulfed by the wildfire smoke over the weekend?  Three days straight for us with lots of air quality alerts.  I hope my Canadian friends are doing okay.

It was a bit of a lazy weekend to start until it wasn't.  (Thanks to me, I'm sure the Mr is mumbling under his breath.). I have been throwing myself into projects this month to keep myself from spiraling over Mom's birthday this week.  Not to mention constantly fighting every aspect of gardening and I swear I typed that sentence before that last time I tried in 2020.  I have fungus gnats in the elevated planters because of all of the damn rain we've been getting and the soil can't dry out for them to die off.  So I got some mosquito dunks that can be cut into 1/8's and put into a gallon of water overnight and then water the area to kill the larvae then dry the soil to kill the adults.  This is apparently common with organic gardening but frustrating AF.  😡

I got some food grade diatomaceous earth for the wall planter where ants have joined the party with the aphids so again, I have to wait for dry days to apply it which will hopefully be tomorrow and then reapply after every rainfall.  I know there will be a time where we'll likely be in a drought so I'm trying not to get too pissy about the rain considering how much I love it for my soul but it's thwarting growing things right now.  One big irritant with starting everything from seed is how damn long it takes to bloom.  I do have a zinnia bloom out front but since everyone and their ancestors said I had to pinch them, it's taking even longer.  The double impatiens I got are growing to some kind of tree trunk level and I thought they were supposed to look like regular short ones but just more rose looking bloom wise.   Like this.  That is not what they look like, just tall green palm trees with no hints of flowers in sight.  

The lack of actual color was seriously getting to me.  Like I was itchy for it, for real.  I've had this idea for picket planters along the top of the fence where the elevated planters are.  I went through our scrap pile and was happy to see painted 1x4's, 1 full fence picket and various picket scraps if needed for the bottoms.  I was originally thinking one long one but thought maybe two would look better so we went that route.  I held up a scrap picket and 1x4 to see where I wanted them to hit if the 1x4's were going to be drilled into the studs on top.  We marked stuff and the Mr got to work.  We were thankfully able to use a lot of scrap wood and I only had to paint the exposed part from the cuts.  I got a flat of yellow marigolds and purple petunias since some of the other colors looked terrible.  I hate marigolds but they supposedly deter squirrels and we like to keep them moving along the top of the fence super highway they have going on.  This is how they turned out.

Because we had so many left, I poked around for more scrap pickets but we used them all.  I saw a hanging basket that's been up in the garage and probably destined for the trash otherwise so I grabbed it and the long hook I took down a few weeks ago.  The top hole was being a poop so I had the Mr grab a scrap piece of 2x4 and pop it behind the non stud part for the screw to grab onto.  It gives nice color over that one too.

I cannot tell you how much better my mood was after that having those pops of color with my Mom and Grandma's favorite colors.  Yes, I'm impatient until my impatiens and other flowers finally friggin bloom.  My snapdragons are doing some kind of bendy thing and I feel like I'm going to have to stake them which is maddening.

I had some tiles I spray painted a few weeks ago and they needed a home so those got hung up.

(Mr...we were clearly delirious when we hung these. 
Get out the drill because the left one is getting moved down 1 1/2 slats)

I planted the rest of the flowers out front in an empty planter after refreshing some of the soil.  The Mr spotted a bebe praying mantis and since I saw aphids on the zinnias out front, I had him transport it over there where it could have a buffet for life.

Whilst doing that, we were listening to the two crazy cake neighbors talk about the previous hillbilly tenants across from them that just moved out two weeks prior.  (Bestie- the truck pictures I texted you of the calico truck being towed!)  We had a good giggle and chat later over the irony of them talking about them like they were the problem when they needed to be looking in the mirror.  By that time, my body waved the white flag.  I've been doing foot strengthening exercises and am in horrible pain on top of the normal horrible pain, the tricep muscle soreness decided to kick in from our second strength workout of last week and my lower back was in fits from all of the bending.  I intended for us to go out and watch a movie later but wasn't feeling it by the end of the night.  We blinked and it was 10pm. 🙄

How was your weekend?

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