My 'Embarassing Secret' FIXED

Because of all your wonderful suggestions, we finally started to have our landscape fixed!

Hope you had a Happy 4th, I know I did!

Overgrown before

Yey! I could see my neighbor!

Vs. I couldn't :-(

NO MORE WEEDS... FOR NOW! :-)

WEED-XTRAVAGANZA!

I could see my windows!

Vs. I couldnt

Just nice!

Just too much

Trimmed and proper

Hurly-burly

Aaaaaahhhhhh.....

Aaaaaaggggghhhhhhh!

Now that the weeds are gone and the trees and shrubs trimmed, I need to add a bit more since my lot seems too barren?!

It never ends does it?!

Hope your having a Great Summer Day!

VEL 

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An Embarrassing 'Secret'

I have an embarrassing 'secret' to share.

It's our horrific garden landscape right now. 

You can hardly see our house anymore

Windows covered all the way up here....

... and here

Weeds everywhere

See???!!!!!

Uuuuuggggghhh! Sorry weeds everywhere!!!!

Our Crab apple is so ginormous already as well as an aberrant maple by the mail box!

I don't think there's any decorative landscaping in this area

Aside from the fact that I can't sew, I also can't garden. :-(

Hopefully we'll be able to remedy this soon since I miss "seeing" our house!

Any suggestions other than gutting our current landscape and re-doing it all over again????

Hope your garden is doing much better than ours!

Have a Great 4th of July Weekend!

VEL

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Fiddle Leaf Update & tips

 Do you remember my Fiddle Leaf Find from Walmart 2 years ago?

Got them for $4 each

Well, surprisingly enough, despite my "black thumb" (which I wrote about HERE),

they have surprisingly held up well and thrived!

BEFORE

AFTER

When I first got them, I was expecting the worse, they weren't exactly in great shape at the start (hence, the clearance bin). But I believe that with our TLC (and bigger pot) they truly are quite remarkable now!

They grew so well that I was able to give 3 of my girlfriends this plant!

I didn't prune them, It turned, out there were 2 in each pot. So I actually ended up paying just $2 per plant?!!! My friends were so happy to get their own fiddle leaf fig too since ours have become so beautiful!

The tallest one so far

My mother-in-law who's an avid gardener in the Philippines, even thought my the Fiddle leaf figs were artificial since they looked so perfect!

What's our secret?
Not much really, but here is what we've been doing and so far, has worked well for these plants:

1) We water these babies generously once  a week in the summer and every 2 weeks in the winter. 

2) I do put some indoor plant fertilizer every 3 months or so (whenever I remember sometimes, so I didn't do this consistently)

3) Aphids can become a problem and nuisance. I just used water with some drops of dish washing soap in them, spray and wipe away. I don't put any oil in the leaves, their just shiny and perfect the way they are.

4) I do trim the bottom (not the top like most experts say) occassionally (like 3x  only since we got them)

5) We did transfer them right away to Bigger Pots for them to grow better! Actually we need to transfer one to a bigger pot soon...

See?

I truly love these plants, and they are perfect touches of green year-round inside our home!

I still want them to look like this though...

Source

So I better get my pruning skills honed right?!

How about you, do you have any indoor plants that makes you happy?

                          Have a Nice Day!

VEL 

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Garden Days & Summer camps

If you've read my blog for a while, you know I'm one those cursed people with the dreaded

BLACK THUMB (daaan daaaan daaan!!!)

via

Yup, the opposite of those people with the GREEN THUMB - I 'Kill' plants. Not on purpose mind you, they just 'don't like me'! ;-)

via

So luckily, I married a man who has better thumbs that I have! And so he's been busy planting up and pretty-fying our back patio with pots and plants.

You already saw what we did with our pergola...

But we also added these to the opposite deck...

Don't mind the weeds, just look at the planters ;-)

We chose boxwoods and got the planters from Sam's Club ($12.99 each which I think is a bargain).

I don't know why we only added these recently, I love them here.

He also repotted this Adenium plant - a gift from a friend

We also had this problem area beside the pool house...

Overgrown weeds BLAH!

As you can see, we plan to remove the weeds and plant these 3 flowering shrubs there too, we just have to have the time to do it. ;-)

On another note, this past weekend, we dropped of my oldest son in Chicago for a 3 week camp, the longest time he'll be away from home.

In his dorm room

I think I'm having more' withdrawal' symptoms than he does, since I am missing him like crazy (yes, he's only been gone less than a day since we dropped him off  yesterday afternoon), so my hubs promised me we're going back next weekend to visit him in Chicago for just a few hours (they limit the visits for parents like me since they feel the child will feel more homesick seeing their parents homesick)

So please excuse me for my sporadic posts since other than taking frequent long drives we're also gearing up for my other son's Summer Camp play the weekend after the 4th!!!

I hope you all have a wonderful and fun 
4th of July everyone!

VEL 

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Making our Wisteria-filled pergola a reality

You probably saw our PLANS after we set up our Pergola.

And we really want to have something like this...

Our inspiration photos are pergola filled with Wisteria Vine. So, naturally, we had to get our Wisteria Vines.

We got ours at a local garden Center -$48 per vine plant

And since the pergola was made of metal, we were afraid with the extreme heat in our area, the metal might end up being too hot for the vine to grow onto. Plus the posts seems too narrow for the vines for the vines as well.

So my brilliant husband devised an ingenious plan to build a trellis on the pergola posts!

Not looking so ingenious yet... ;-)

I have to thank my hubs for this idea immensely since I initially tried to convince him to buy something like this because I was doubtful of that plan...

Romantic Curved trellis from Menards

I just thought something ready-made would be easier and quicker, but then it's made of metal again, and I'm not sure our wisteria will survive climbing up these. 

So he built this instead....

Looks way better than my store-bought trellis

Up close

He built this using  2" x 1" pieces of wood and painted it with black outdoor paint.

We used the original trellis first to let the vines get acclimated to it's new pot and location.

We also added some mushroom compost around the vine plant as recommended by the gardener at the garden center we bought it from (apparently fungus is the wisteria's main enemy- anyhow, we both don't know much about it so we just followed what the gardener said, if you know something about vines, please let me know on how we can take care of it better!).

Our Wisteria without her 'crutches'

After a few days we removed the trellis our wisteria came with and tied her up to our own trellis.

We're keeping a close eye on it and hopefully we'll be able to share our progress on this. 

On a  not-so-good-note, they say it may take up to 3 years before a wisteria would start blossoming. But I'm in no rush, we just want the greenery to start creeping up before the winter starts again and also just trying to keep our wisteria alive! Cross your fingers with me would you?

Have a Great Week!

VEL 

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