Flowers Flowers Flowers

Growing flowers in your own yard is not only aesthetically pleasing but it is also environmentally friendly. I, like many of you, enjoy bring color into my home through a nice vase of flowers. It always brightens my day when I see a nice bouquet of daffodils sitting on my dresser. However, store bought flowers are often very bad for the environment. Cut flowers are often treated with many kinds of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides that are known to cause health problems. Additional, many flowers that provide the diversity at floral shops are imported which contributes to the carbon dioxide problem. So the most eco-friendly choice (and not to mention easier on the bank account) is to grow your own flowers.
Although it wasn't very nice weather today my mom, my boy and I planted our flower garden in the front yard. We have a selection of iris, blue bells, heather, roses, lilies, and lilac. I can't wait for them to bloom. We will be planting some seed flowers in the bed in May and then adding some bulbs in the fall. We also seeded the rest of the yard for some grass and along the way discovered some tulips hiding under a bush, which I am thrilled about. We could never grow tulips at my parents house because the deer destroyed them, which made me so sad because tulips have to be one of my favorite flowers. Luckily there are no deer here! I finished my flower gardening by planting some sweet peas in the backyard. We will be bringing some more flowers for the front yard but we won't be planting much more until the exterior of the house is painted (yes! more painting!).
We also decided that we are going to try to make the most of the soil in the backyard and not do raised beds. We are going to use the clay soil we currently have by adding sand and doing a lot of stirring. Hopefully our crops will take and we won't get any flooding (the other day when we had some rain the back part of the yard flooded so much so that we had ducks enjoying the "pond"). I am completely consumed by this gardening thing. I have never done so much gardening before but I love it! I can't wait to reap the rewards.