like garden gnomes

i really do love to garden. right now we have only the patio garden, with a few big pots. i'm on the waiting list for a community garden space at many community gardens in our area, but for now it's just the patio. seeing as i love to garden, and have a deep yearning for trees and lushness, you'd think i might strive to keep our plants alive? we'll you'd be right about the striving part, but sadly mistaken about the living part! i have one green thumb (the planting one) and one wilty thumb... our tree and plants from earlier this spring didn't like the psycho hot weather any more than we did, and i think our watering chain of command broke down sometime in august... (that would be me asking jamie and cole to water the plants and lots of times not).

so, i bought some fresh greenery yesterday on a whim (i was alone and driving and hey, let's go to the garden shop, self!). cole helped me, which was a lot of fun, a lot of mess, and some help. ;-) but fun! he likes to sweep and dig and transfer soil from one pot to another - we just need to work on what is swept into whose shoe and which soil should be taken to where... seriously though, a great afternoon.

we even planted some crocus and mini daffodil bulbs so we have something to get excited about in the springtime! now all i have to do is take down the dead tree to the garbage room incognito (too bad i dumped our old gorilla masks in the goodwill bin yesterday) and then wait for rain so i can wash the balcony off discretely...

randomly, since they kind of go with the topic of mud and gardening - here are a few shots of cole from our trip on friday to queen elizabeth park and the bloedel conservatory (which i always garble and call the bird observatory).

we loved looking at the birds and fish inside, but i think cole was even more impressed with the loose soil outside. he dug and dug, brought me handfuls and got entirely grimey.

and i was going to crop the dude and stroller out of this photo, but it's too funny. his whole family was motioning wildly for him to get out of the way of the camera, which i had perched on the wall and on self timer mode, but he didn't even notice... and yet i'm still fake smiling and giving him the "get a f'in clue and out of my photo" look... cole is dropping a handful of dirt onto the ground and trying to escape. too perfect.