yard work.

as you know, we've been working around the outside of our house A LOT lately. when the weather is nice there's no way i'm staying inside to clean or just be lazy {or do what i really should: study}.

so every chance we get, we work on the garden, the flower beds, the yard, whatever. even on thursday afternoons when austin only works half a day, we work. recently we went to get another truckload of mulch {free from the city!} to put around the plants in the front flower beds we worked on when mom and timmy were here.

before mulch:

after mulch:

much better, yes? and less watering!

and a little update on the plants we planted around the rain barrel.

when we bought and planted the little purple columbines they had already bloomed so we thought they were done for the year. but check it out! they filled up again with these awesomely evil looking buds...

and then bloomed into these pretty little purple flowers. hooray for surprises!

i also transplanted two wild columbine plants from various places in the yard into a flower bed in the back. i'm hoping they'll make it, but they were in the yard so they would have been mowed down if we hadn't tried to transplant them.

{this one is actually blooming right now!}

another of the plants around the rain barrel is starting to bloom as well.

we moved this little plant to a flower bed, too. he's surviving quite well, but i actually don't know what he is... {mom?}

and just for fun here's some updated pictures of our veggie gardens we planted a few weeks ago.

these pictures were taken a week or so ago and things are actually much bigger than this already. austin even has a few baby tomatoes growing. and our neighbors must think our lawn mower is broken or we don't know how to use it because our grass {er... our weeds in the yard} is soooo tall. like knee high in some places. but since it hasn't rained in forever and who knows when it's going to rain again, we're just letting it grow. the neighbors will just have to look the other way for now.