French Ethereal

Welcome to this month’s Pinterest Challenge, dear friends, where our lovely hostess Cindy from County Road 407 gives us an image or an idea to inspire us, then we take off with our own interpretation. This time, we are sharing our Spring Containers. Happily, I potted up a bunch of pots this past fall and winter!

Our inspiration photograph comes from Carlene of Organized Clutter. Her gardens are absolutely gorgeous; soooo pretty! Carlene loves using beautiful, old and rusty vintage farm pieces as accents out in each of her garden beds. I just LOVE the look!

If you are coming over from Amber at Follow the Yellow Brick Home for the first time, welcome! Don’t you just love what Amber has planted in her containers?!! Amber’s gardens are always magnificent. I find it really fun to study the way she puts plantings together. So much goodness there!

Our spring containers

Late last fall, I set up pretty much every piece of crockery I had stored inside our shed to create a massive spring display of blooms. I also pulled out a number of saved heavy-plastic containers and planted those up, too.

Now I don’t have much in the way of vintage farm tools here on our property, but I do have little statuary. Mr. Rabbit came out of the shed and stands guard in front of these bulbs.

In springtime, we get a lot of rain here in North Texas. Sometimes our backyard really floods, so I raised most of the pottery and set them on bricks and/or plant feet.

The daffodils came up first. Not many came up but that’s because the local wildlife munched on a number of the bulbs. (So much for Mr. Rabbit’s guarding!)

I forgot to place chickenwire over each one to keep the bulbs safe, but that’s okay!

I have one particular squirrel who is very friendly. He comes very close and loves sunflower seeds and sometimes peanuts in their shells. Anything leftover gets cleaned up by the birds ~ nothing goes to waste.

This urn and its twin are just outside our front door and Mr. Squirrel was out front so I brought him some treats!

Back in the backyard

The previous photos’ pots are located to the right of the garden shed’s door, and this is the left-hand side. I wish everything had bloomed all at once for you but nature tends to do whatever it wants.

Here you can see one of my maiden statues. This angel only has one wing now and she used to have a sister, but the twin angel was sold at a garage sale we had and she stayed in California.

I may turn this angel statue into a water fountain later this year as she is set up for it. I saw a bowl which would work as a base up at The Greenhouse Nursery in Ardmore, Oklahoma, last month. I do have her broken wing and may be able to cement it back on, too. Future projects.;)

I have captured some of the tulips blooming in the yard and in the one pot infront of the shed. That was about a week ago…

Here is this same pot just this past Saturday! So glorious with so many tulips up!! And these aren’t any special bulbs but ones I found at Winco this early winter. I bought as many as I could at each grocery trip. They are really pretty!

I also had some found in pots from Walmart which bloomed in February. This pretty cane and glass vase came filled with these tulips still closed. We found this on a grocery shopping trip to Costco. These were lovely!

What’s going on out in the vegetable garden?

I can’t remember if it was late January or in early February, but I built the square Vego-Garden raised beds ~ one at my mother-in-law’s house over in North Denton and one here at our house in South Denton. I spent a couple of weeks putting them together and deciding if I wanted a rectangle or a square.

I had picked up yellow onion and red onion starts and had plenty for her garden bed and ours. I also planted seed potatoes, a couple of indeterminate tomatoes, garlic, strawberries, more lettuces, beets and radishes.

The three year old asparagus put up some bigger stalks this year! It has already gone to fluffy fronds and that’s okay. I bet next year we will have some really nice, harvestable stalks of asparagus to enjoy!

This is a view down the south fence. The trees and bushes survived the six weeks of over 100 degrees last summer with daily waterings. We ran long lines of 3/4″ poly tubing from the front yard and tapped off of it with drip lines.

Here is this sweet persistant cherry in full bloom just a couple of weeks ago. I am so excited to see this tree thriving in its spot! Gardening in Texas has been an enormous learning curve for me, and I’ve lost several trees from either overwatering or not watering enough. Erring on the side of watering everyday last summer paid off as most every plant made it to fall in this southside garden.

I think this year I will modify this a bit by running a second line over top so I can split off the plants which really want less water and are drought tolerant ~ like the climbing roses which only need water two to three times a week.

Same with the butterfly bushes and lavenders. The Jane magnolia trees have yet to bloom but will hopefully early next month.

During the winter, I attached plastic-coated wires along the fence to train up the climbers. I can’t wait to see them all in bloom!

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Upcoming projects

Last summer I found an fence online for a good price and bought it thinking it came put together. The fence came in pieces that fit together and then you drill and screw it together.

The pieces sat all winter in a long box in our living room up against the bookcases. Over last weekend, Mr. Ethereal worked on getting the supports cemented into the ground and this weekend, he and I worked on setting the posts, drilling and bolting the posts in place, and putting the fence together (mostly him!).

I’ll share that in another post soon, but it looks great!

Here are a few last looks around our containers this spring. After not being able to bring hardly any pottery from California when we had to sell our last house there (hubby was out of work for two years), I’ve spent these past seven years slowly finding unique containers. I really love these heavy terracotta pots from Italy!

And this is our last one to share with you today. This tall urn is filled with a beautiful dark pink rose ~ Miranda Lambert ~ and it will be blooming very soon.

I hope you can use some of these ideas of looking for beautiful containers, adding fun statuary and a little fencing around your home! The big box stores carry small fence pieces which are perfect for adding around garden beds as accent pieces, and large nurseries are where I found most of my urns and pottery.

Thank you all for stopping by! I hope you have enjoyed a look at our spring garden and if you enjoyed my little corner of the blogosphere, please consider subscribing. Let’s see what our friend and hostess Cindy of County Road 407 shares in her containers, shall we?

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Spring blessings to you,