Zinnias

Zinnias are a favorite plant for my garden. Here is a photo of them as seedlings. I love starting flower plants from seeds. One thing I like to do is study what each phase of the plant looks like so when I'm in my garden I know what is a plant that I want in my garden and what is a weed. Each spring my neighbor and I will walk about our gardens and say " Do you think this is a weed" Most of the time I will know. "Yes, that plant is a Black Eyed Susan, they have hairy leaves, or no, that's a weed, you can see them down by the railroad." It is fun to do this with my neighbor.






Here are the babies planted in the garden. They are growing out of their baby leaves and starting to have their regular leaves "I wonder would you call them their adult leaves?" I'll have to study up on that. In the back ground are my Dianthus plants. I thought they were annuals, but they came back this spring. Which was a wonderful surprise. My garden at one point was very pink. It is so nice to look out the back window and see all the color.


Here they are all grown up and in full bloom. These are Thumbelina Zinnias. Their flowers are smaller, but they actually grew taller than I had thought they would. I have to admit that I'm not good at measurement, and visualizing what measurements will look like. So I'm sure if I was better at this I would have known that they would be tall with small flowers. I was expecting them to be short with small flowers. My neighbor said that it is more my gift of growing things than what they are supposed to be. She believes every thing I grow becomes much bigger than what it should be. She told me she tells all her friends about my gardening abilities. She thinks I should start a plant nursery. I'm not sure I'd love it as much if I did it full time.

I also love that one pack of seeds can give you so many different colors. Light pink, red, orange, white and purple all mixed together. Zinnias also begin small and continue to open for weeks. They also bloom all summer and into the fall. I love how the tops almost looks as if the flower has a crown on it. I had two butterflies dancing around in them this afternoon. It was a beautiful sight. Unfortunately I was watching from the window and didn't get any photo's.

Here is a close up of the orange/yellow thumbelina zinnia. They are so beautiful. For those of you with a resident "Peter Rabbit" They don't seem to like to eat zinnias. That is a nice thing you don't have to put any thing around them they just don't taste good. One thing I keep track of in my garden (with the flowers) is which plants "Peter" eats and which he ignores. I try to plant the ones he ignores. I'm lucky because we don't have to deal with "Bambi "or his mother in my garden.

Light Pink. This is a pretty young flower. You can tell by how small the middle of the flower is.

Purple. This one is older, see how the middle is larger and the yellow ring of flowers are open around the middle. I always think of the little ring of yellow flowers together as being like a little crown.

Unemployment World: Today was a busy day for my husband, he was out and trying to get face time with lots of Auto Shops. He has a shop in Somerville that is interested in hiring him. He has an Interview on Tuesday at 11:00 am. On one hand I would love for him to get a job, and this place would give him paid training, which is a great plus. BUT he would have to work Sundays and we both really don't want that. In this economy though I'm not sure you can be that picky.

The other thing is well it's just so nice for us to have time together. I was planning things for us to do together once the kids got back into school. Even our son commented about how nice it was to just have him home. If anything we have had a lot of peaceful summer days lately. So as much as a job would be good, I guess I was hoping for a few more weeks of unemployment vacation. That is the good thing about having no debt, no car payments, and lots of food stored up in your house. You can live at a comfortable level even on unemployment. But OK you do need to have a job.