As the Garden Grows

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Have you ever thought of using a professional landscaper?

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I know that many of you who read this blog have lovely gardens that you’ve worked on for years. Others are just starting out and some of you would eventually love to have a beautiful yard, but you’re still trying to figure out how you’d like your landscaping to look.

Have you ever thought of contacting a professional landscaping company? The company that I’m writing about today is called Leisure Landscapes and they service the Triangle area of North Carolina.

I’ve written about landscaping in past articles. Some people contact a landscaper and are provided with landscape design ideas that they can then either approve and have the landscaping company begin work on their yard, other people pay to have a landscape designer come to their home, provide design ideas that would work with their layout and their gardening zone and then begin the design projects themselves. In the last case they’ve just payed the landscape company for an opinion and design ideas.

Most landscaping companies provide a variety of services such as the installation of patios, walks and walls, landscape lighting, gardens, fountains, decks and arbors. Many will also install fences, lawns, irrigation systems, ponds and even plant small to large trees on your properties. I believe most landscaping companies also offer a maintenance service to keep your newly landscaped yard looking lovely. Certainly Leisure Landscapes provides all of these services and more.

Do think about contacting a landscaping company if you want to revamp your property and create something special.






Goin2travel could make it easier for our to plan our next family reunion vacation

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I’m behind in my blog posts this weekend because we’re having our big family reunion this weekend. In about an hour I’ll be going over to my brothers home where we’ll be having a big barbecue. All of my brothers and my sister will be there with their spouses and children. It should be fun.

I expect at some point during todays activities we’ll begin to discuss what we’d like to do next year for our family reunion. In prior planning sessions we’ve discussed traveling to other countries for our reunions.

Obviously if we were going to hold one of our get togethers outside the country we’d probably look in to some kind of vacation rental as this would keep our costs down and I’m sure we’d have fun staying together in one or two vacation rentals.

So … I’m doing a bit of research before I leave for the BBQ. There’s a site called Goin2travel.com that specializes in worldwide vacation rentals. Owners and managers of various types of vacation rentals list their rentals and availability on the site and people like myself who are looking to rent can browse through the selection and find the ideal vacation rental.

One of my brothers went to San Diego a couple of years ago and he just loved the area so maybe we’ll look into San Diego vacation rental homes. Another idea might be to look for Newport beach rental homes. The beauty of this site is that you can find vacation rentals just about anywhere.

Actually … one of my brothers lives in Vancouver Canada and we haven’t had our family reunion out west yet. Perhaps I should look for vacation rentals in Whistler BC. Staying in a lovely mountain home sounds beautiful doesn’t it?

I’m bookmarking this site and I’m definitely going to be telling my siblings about it when I see them in an hour or so. It might really help us plan our next reunion.

If you want to see my garden here’s a sneak peek

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Warning! My garden is very small. It’s jam packed with plants, but it’s small.

Here’s a view of the garden. I took this photo while standing with my back against the edge of the house. In other words I took it from near the base of the back stairs.

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As you can see I utilized every space available!

To the immediate right there’s a small storage area. Basically it’s a large grey wooden box that’s attached to the stairs. We keep our garbage containers in it. On top of that area I have several balcony planters where I grow everything from lettuce to tomatoes. I’ve also got my Jasmine or Camellia or whatever it is (see last post) in that area, as well as a Christmas cactus, ornamental pepper and a passion flower.

Immediately in front of the garbage storage area and our enclosed back porch is our small patio area. You can only see a portion of this area in the photo. We have a nice patio table that takes up most of the patio space. We’ve also got raised flower beds surrounding the patio. You can’t really see the central flower bed well in this photo but it’s behind the table.

So the patio table is surrounded by lovely plants. This gives the area the feel of being a separate garden room. Yes, I’m growing some tomatoes in pots on the patio. I’ve also got containers with cucumbers, green beans and tiny tom or cherry tomatoes growing on the other side of the table.

The rest of the garden is a mass of roses, lavender, balloon flowers, brown eyed susans, spring bulbs, hostas, lilies, daylilies and at least a hundred other types of perennial and annual plants.

Our neighbors house is behind ours. He actually lives on the adjoining street so his driveway is at the end of our garden. We also have very close neighbors on either side and can in fact see at least four of our neighbors backyards from our garden. I suppose that’s why I’ve tried to grow plants that are 3+ feet tall along the edges of the garden. It creates the illusion of privacy even if our yard is not the least bit private.

Oh yes I said the garden was small. It measures about 17 feet wide by 30 to 35 feet in length from the back of the house.

There. So now when I talk about my backyard garden you’ll have a good idea of what I’m talking about.

BTW if you click on any of my photos it will take you to my flickr account where you can click on the words “all sizes” above the photo to see a larger image if you want to see the photo in greater detail.

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