Flowers in my garden mid-Spring

This Spring the amaryllis flowers are amazing. There are 19 stems of flowers in-all and they have grown really tall. Their red trumpets are huge and look like rich velvet. I have never seen them do this well before. Maybe the mild Winter had something to do with their success. 

This is the gravel pathway between the house and garage where we grow plants in pots and tubs and also raise new cuttings.

The clematis is also doing well, it is absolutely full of pretty blue flowers. We love it so much that we have bought 3 more in different colours. One has buds on and the other 2 are madly climbing up their stakes. I will take some photos of them when they flower.

We also bought a red mandevilla plant, it has lots of new growth on it and quite a few buds.

We're not sure where we're going to plant the mandevilla. It may look good growing up the fence at the front of the house. Or we may put it in a large plant pot and keep it where it is.

This yellow snapdragon plant has been growing and successfully flowering for over 3 years.

We didn't know that snapdragons could be grown as perennials. We trim each stem, when it has finished flowering, to just below the seedheads, and leave the plant alone through Winter.

Dad has created a new flowerbed at the side of the water tanks. We are planting hydrangeas, foxgloves and aquilegia here as it is quite shady under the fruit trees.

This flower bed now joins the existing bed where the arctotis and cineraria grow.

And the flowerbed continues around one of the lime trees to where we have planted white irises and phlomis. 

Dad is going to widen the iris bed and I have ordered more irises in different colours to go here. They will be arriving in late January, so there is plenty of time to prepare.

The abutilons that we planted at the far corner of the garden are growing well, and the self-seeded white foxgloves are much taller than me now!

The orange clivia put on a good show this year. I am thinking of maybe getting a yellow-flowered one to put in another shady spot, next to the garden shed, under the plum tree.

I hope that this post finds you well. Wishing you a lovely weekend.

Hugs, Rose xxx

Fright Night was so much fun!

 

It was officially Fright Night in our village on Saturday evening from 5pm to 7pm. I decorated our entrance with the paper spiral ghosts and pumpkins that I had made earlier, plus plastic spiders and bats. Nothing too scary as our house was registered as a safe house as opposed to a scare house.

We bought about 3 kg of Halloween-themed sweets which I put in a large wicker basket covered with black netting with a bat pattern on. Then I hung orange and black balloons on our mailbox at the front of the drive.

This year we kept our door closed so that the children had to knock and say trick-or-treat when we opened it. Last year we just kept the door open which wasn't as exciting for the kids. The children started arriving at 4.45pm and finished at 7.30pm. 

My 92-year-old mum sat on a chair in the hallway, excited to see all the costumes and watch the children's reactions. Mum kept a tally of how many children visited. She counted 167 in all 👀👻🦇

I had a great time handing out the sweets. The children were all very polite, asking how many sweets they were allowed to take and saying thank you. I loved seeing their costumes and how excited they were. One dad brought his baby (less than a year old), dressed up for Halloween, and took a sweet lol. Some of the children had made their costumes themselves, but the majority had been bought or made by parents. 

One boy was dressed in a huge inflatable dinosaur outfit. But the outfit had an air leak, so his friend held onto the dinosaur tail to get more air into the body, but when he let go, the neck and head deflated and fell to the ground. It was funny to see, but I did feel sorry for the kid. I gave him extra sweets for his effort. 

I asked the children if any of them had a trick prepared, only one girl had who did 4 cartwheels for extra sweets. Then another boy said he could do backward flips but was too tired and another said he could ride a scooter.

The children liked the decorations that I had made and inspected them closely. One boy told his friend that this is the spider woman's house because I put plastic spiders out this year and last year. So now I am known as the Spider Woman 🕷🕸

The Halloween-themed sweets were very popular, especially the red eyeballs and vampires blood lollipops. One young girl asked if the eyeballs were real. She looked rather worried, so I told her they were made of jelly but she could pretend they were real. She was very pleased with my answer!

 I can't wait until next year's Fright Night. Mum was so happy she said it is better than going out. She thought that some of the costumes were scary, but most of them made her laugh. And she really enjoyed counting how many children came.

I hope you had a fun weekend too.

Hugs, Rose xxx