A Change of Color

Spring has come to Sacramento and I took advantage of our beautiful, sunny and low 70s weather and did some painting over the long President's Day weekend.

I always forget what a pain painting can be.  And the older I get the more literal I mean that.  My quads have been on inactive duty since around October so after just a few hours of squatting, stretching, bending, and climbing I was feeling like rubber.

Although I'm a big fan of color - who isn't - I'm also becoming a disciple of the school that says gardens should have a limited color palette.  To that end, I'm trying to move toward the classic brown, white, and green color combo.

That meant that my red and white shed would need a latex bath of Behr's Sweet Molasses.
 

This is the view from our back porch.  The shed dominates the scene in all weathers.  While many guests (and at least one member of my family) have remarked about how quaint it looks, I found myself wanting to notice it less often.  I want the plants to be the star when they grow in.  

After a couple days, this is what I ended up with:

It still holds some visual weight, but I think that's more of a result of its size than its color.  

Growing up on either side of the window are climbing roses that will someday cover a majority of the shed in profuse white blooms for months on end.  I'm looking forward to that.

One more thing: I had a poetry teacher that used to tell us that we needed to know the rules before we could break the rules. Well, if my rule is a color palette of green, brown, and white, I broke that rule with abandon when I let my daughter pick out the paint color for our Adirondack chairs.  

We went from weathered (which I liked) but dirty (which no one liked)

To this eye-assaulting pop of color:

I really wanted to paint these a matching brown, but since this was a family project, I deferred to my daughter's choice.  One of the best things about painting, and gardening, is that you can always change your mind.

The Annual Mother's Day Garden Tour Part 1

I've been taking my wife and mother-in-law to a garden tour each Mother's Day weekend for the past seven years.  The tour raises funds for an elementary school in the neighborhood where these gardens are.  

It's a great tradition for us even though we all feel like it's become much more of a "backyard living" tour than actual garden tour.  There were seven stops total and I'll share pictures from most of those stops over the next few days.  

This first house was by far the most "garden like" house on the tour.  

There was no lawn in the front yard.  Only the flagstone patio with the fountain in the middle as pictured above and the flower beds shown in the first picture.

I love rain chains.  I've never been able to get one that worked very well for me but I love the look and the whole idea behind them.

I remember a whole thread of posts on Dave's Garden called "Show Us Your Compost Bins".  I think a lot of avid gardeners avoid composting because they have small spaces and they don't want it to look bad.  But this three-bin series fits right into the yard and doesn't look bad at all.  

The sound of running water is always welcome in the Sacramento heat.

These adirondack chairs were right next to the pond.

A single grape vine growing in this narrow side yard.

This jasmine-covered arbor smelled wonderful.  My wife, who sneezes every time she even happens to see a jasmine plant remarked out loud that she thought it might be worth all the sneezes to have this in our yard.

I'll leave you with a shot of their back porch.  The watering can was a staged item, I'm sure, but it was a nice touch.  

Stay tuned for more pictures in the coming days and happy Mother's Day to all the Mother's out there.