The best project that happened by far this summer was the outdoor shower that Austin made (shown here sans door). I had no idea how much it would get used, or how nice a feature it’d be, especially with this gorgeous view of the garden (when the door’s open, of course).
I got on an outdoor whimsy kick, after concluding that I don’t really enjoy playing with flowers very much because it is never done. After I realized my problem with getting into flower gardening, I thought, well, why don’t I do some outdoor beautification projects that are one-time efforts?
So in addition to spreading a lot of mulch and building up our small stone edging in our entrance bed, I started on lots of little things, like making a little stone sculpture out of leftover rocks to hide an old decaying stump….
And a towel rack out of a stick and some knobs we had lying around…
and a bird bath out of the base of a lamp I got at the thrift store for $2 and a ceramic plate/bowl I got at the Habitat store for $1…
and some suncatchers out of melting Perler beads, either into circular baking pans or stringing them onto wire and melting them (the kids helped a lot with this one!)…
and some flowers out of drink cans to dress up the wall of the outdoor shower…
and some art for the porch out of the random bits of metal we’ve found around our house while gardening…
and some more art for the front porch…
and art for the side porch…
And a dragonfly that I made out of a table leg from The Habitat Store ($2) and some old fan blades from a dead ceiling fan….
A couple of our nature highlights from this summer include this big old black snake eating an egg. (Pretty impressive! Note, the second picture is meant to show how long this dude was.)
And here is a snake just hatching out of its egg. I was spreading mulch, and apparently our black snakes like to lay their eggs in the mulch. As I spread the mulch I kept coming across these eggs. One of them hatched about 30 seconds after I moved it from the mulch I was working on. Black snakes when they’re little aren’t black, but are actually striped like this little guy. The reason I know for sure they’re not copperheads (which as adults have much more similar markings to what this guy looks like now) is that copperheads are viviparous—give birth to live young—so no copperhead eggs.
