Cottage Garden: Blooming Out

You wait all spring sowing and starting seeds for that week when everything starts to bloom out, and it's finally here! Dreamland Zinnia nestled behind a cosmos.

Those flowers are in this row in the garden. I am especially liking how this is turning out. If you have trouble starting alyssum from seed, winter sow it in a milk jug. It works for me every time.

I sometimes forget scale in the garden, and the yarrow here is growing above my view of this pot where I am growing coral punch impatients and dusty miller. 

This is the view of that yarrow, and you can't even see the pot of impatients and dusty miller until you walk right over to them. Maybe when the yarrow is finished blooming, I will cut it back. 

In front of my one garden I have these elevated garden beds where each year I grow petunias and some sort of salvia. This year I have an easy wave coral petunia and Bee Heaven salvia; there are also a few Blue Victoria salvia in there that haven't shot up yet.

Here is a long view of those flowers. Each year the petunias grow to the ground, and I have to keep them trimmed. I really like them spilling out of these planters. I have to deadhead them every day, also. 

As you exit the back door I have a grouping of planters full of blooms. Each year, it is something different. This year I put in a Burpee fragrant mix of flowers, and it was full of some flowers I don't even recognize. It has been interesting to watch these grow. That mum in the largest pot in the back overwintered! I was shocked. I have never had a fall mum make it through winter.

I was most excited to see the forget-me-nots, Alyssum, and Batchelor's buttons. Those I recognized.

The potting table and my cottage cat.

The Rudabeckia self sowed and I started the pansies from seed this spring. The pansies like it in the shade of the Rudabeckia now that it is getting warmer.

The herb garden. The rose branches are trimmings from the rose this spring, and they work wonderfully to keep the cottage cats out of the garden bed.

This plant completely self-sowed in a pot in the herb garden. I believe it is Mullein.?

These daylilies grow wild here in the country. My grandmother dug these up years ago, and I brought them to my garden. I have plants from each of my grandmothers, and I love seeing them bloom because it reminds me of them and their love for gardening.