Memes – Page 38

Dreamy Hellebores

In about a month or so my Hellebores will start to emerge from their long winter slumber. Along with the crocus’ and my chives the hellebores are often one of the first flowers to emerge each spring. This flower is sometimes called the Christmas rose because in some areas it will bloom in late December. In this area, or at least in my garden it emerges in March, but doesn’t usually bloom until April.

There are approximately 20 species of Helleborus. The flowers have five petals (sepals) surrounding a ring of small cup like nectaries. The sepals remain on the plant rather than fall off as petals would on most flowers. Sometimes the sepals remain on the plant for many months.

Unfortunately many helleborus are considered poisonous. Now that we have a puppy who will more than likely enjoy the backyard frequently we might have to get rid of our hellebores. Of course we always keep a careful eye on our pup and if by chance we can train her to stay out of the garden beds we might be able to keep some of our more risky plants, but I’m not sure I want to take that chance.

Do you grow Hellebores?

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information. GTS participants remember to check in at As the Garden Grows each week so that we’ll know you made a new post!

It’s going to snow all weekend?

by Tricia

Grab the Photo Hunt code.
Photo Theme. Visit participants.

This weeks theme is Heavy

We’ve had a lot of snow here in Toronto this week. I think we ended up getting close to 20 inches of snow. This is on top of all the snow we got the Friday before!

As you can see the snow was so heavy that it caused one of my plant stands to topple over in the garden.

Normally I take the planters off the plant stand in the late fall, but I didn’t this year and this will serve as a good reminder as to why I should always take the planters down in the autumn. Look at that. The pole was anchored in the ground yet it still fell over!

We’re going to have more snow today and tomorrow and then again on Tuesday! I have no idea where we’ll put all the snow. My front lawn is tiny. It’s only about 10 feet long by 7 or 8 feet wide and the snow pile on the lawn is already as high as the car!

I think my back will break if I’ve got to shovel more snow … especially if I have to throw it five or six feet to get it on top of the pile on the lawn.

Please visit two of my other blogs that are participating in the Photo Hunt – We’ve had a lot of snow this week here in Toronto and if you want to see just how much please visit My World. You can also see what my puppy finds heavy over at Tricia’s Musings.

Check in for Green Thumb Sunday!

by Tricia

Green Thumb Sunday participants:

I realize that now that it’s winter not everyone on the blogroll is participating each week. Whether that’s a lack of having some plant, garden or landscape photos stored up for winter GTS posts or due to not thinking about the garden as much during the cool months of winter, I don’t know, but it’s a fact that not everyone makes a GTS post each and every week.

To make it a little bit easier on those of you who’ve made a Green Thumb post and who want to visit others that have made a new post each week why don’t we work this a little bit like the Saturday Photo Hunt?

Here’s how it will work:

Each week I’ll make sure that my own Green Thumb Sunday post is up by midnight EST (Eastern Standard Time ( – 5 h GMT). Most of the time I’ll auto-publish my post just to make sure it goes up on time.
Once my post is up please feel free to leave a comment on my post stating that you’ve also made a Green Thumb Sunday post.
Please don’t just come by and say “mines up”. No one likes getting those kind of comments … not really, right?
If you want to visit others who have made a GTS post that week it will be very easy to see who’s made a post by visiting my GTS post. Just go through the list of those who’ve commented to visit their sites.

The blogroll will still exist and you can still go through the list of sites on the blogroll to see who’s made a post each week if you’d like. I’m only suggesting this to make it that much easier to see who’s participated each week.

Tag your posts!

If your blogging platform allows you to add tags to your post please do so.

Please tag your posts with Green Thumb Sunday and GTS. If you do this people will also be able to search for the term Green Thumb Sunday or GTS in Technorati to find new Green Thumb posts each week as well.

Suggestions:

If you tend to make more than one post on Sundays, perhaps you participate in other regular Sunday memes or have a regular feature post on Sundays, it would be nice if you would use the Green Thumb Sunday logo in your post or put GTS or Green Thumb Sunday in the title of your post so that it’s easy to find your GTS post.

I know that I’ve sometimes had trouble deciding just which post was the Green Thumb Sunday posts on some blogs that make multiple posts on Sundays! I’m sure you have too!

I have the blogroll set up so that those who have posted recently should rise to the top of the list. Of course this will only happen if your blogging platform automatically sends out a ping when there is a new post.

For example WordPress blogs are automatically set up to ping rpc.pingomatic.com/. You can add more ping sites to WordPress blogs by going to Options -> Writing – and then scrolling to the bottom of that page to where it says Update Services. You can then add more ping sites. I’ve added pings for:

Technorati – http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Feedburner – http://ping.feedburner.com

*Remember to save your changes if you add more ping sites!

If your blog doesn’t automatically send out a ping to ping sites to let the world know your blog has a new post on it you can manually ping your site at a number of places. I sometimes manually ping my sites at Pingoat or Pingomatic. Hint – once you’ve pinged your site you can save your ping page to your bookmarks to make it that much easier to ping your site the next time without filling out all the feed info over and over again.

So what does everyone think? Are you willing to do a check in visit to my GTS post each week to let us all know you’ve got a new Green Thumb Sunday post up?

** Note – My Green Thumb Sunday post for the week is below this one. If you agree that we should do a weekly check in please leave a comment on my GTS post below to let all of this weeks participating members know that you’ve made a new post too.

Dreamy Hellebores

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