Our long and cold winter is finally over.  We are so happy to welcome Spring and so are the pups! We will have pics of them playing in the yard in the upcoming weeks.  We have some fun activities already planned for Spring. 

As you may remember, Apollo came to stay with us for a few days.  He is one of the calmest Greyhounds we have ever met.  He is a beautiful and sweet boy.  He is certainly welcome to stay with us again, any time.  Mitch did not want Apollo to leave.  Unlike me, he doesn’t feel that way about every hound we doggie sit.  🙂  He has told me that he is going to ask for a hound like Apollo when we are ready to adopt again.  That won’t be for a long while.  We are at our max with three.  Below are a few more pics I took of this sweet, velcro boy. His velcro personality made him hard to photograph while he was standing.  He loves to lean against you and bear all his weight. 

One of the many great things about Spring aside from the beautiful weather is all the pops of color you get from the blooming trees and flowers. This is one of our Forsythia bushes.  I love the bright yellow this bush produces this time of year.  We have 5 of these along the driveway.  So pretty. I just wish they bloomed for a longer period of time.

We are in the process of totally re-vamping our flower beds in front of the house.  After two years of trying multiple plants with little success, we sought professional help from a landscaping company (Natural Progression Landscaping).  I had a coupon for 60% off of the consultation, which included the landscape design.  The landscape designer met with us, took measurements and pictures of our current flower beds, chatted with us to find out what our needs/desires were and then designed a plan.  She sent us the design in a PDF file and also gave us tips for planting.  One tip we got was how to rid your property of voles. We have had a terrible time with getting rid of voles and our plants have suffered because of these pesky creatures.  She advised us to use Permatil with all our plantings.  We both had never heard of this product, but are willing to try it and will hopefully be saying bye, bye to the pesky voles! 

We accomplished 90% of one of the two flower beds this weekend.  We planted 23 of the 28 plants on Saturday.  We are waiting for the nursery to get in the 5 remaining Perennials that we will plant in this bed.  We plan to work on the other flower bed in early May.  We have 25 plants to plant in that bed.  We wanted to have color all year long and with the variety of plants she choose for us, it should be beautiful during all four seasons.  🙂

Some of the bulbs I planted two years ago are blooming also. I am hoping more come up soon.  I planted 50 along the driveway last year. 

I love the fragrance and color of these! I have no idea what they are (lost the tag), but they are pretty and very fragrant.

We also have lots and lots of birds.  One of the many things we love about this subdivision.  It is very park like.  We have a feeder in the front yard that will fill twice a week.  We have seen Cardinals, Blue Jays, Wren’s, Oriels, and Woodpeckers feed at our feeder.  They are really neat to watch.  This is what Cueball had his eye on in our latest Wordless Wednesday – Expressionism post. He loves to watch the world out of the big bay window. The birds have become use to us now and continued to feed while we were doing our yard work.  The feeder is just feet from the flower bed we were working in. 

I did not have my zoom lens outside with me.  I wish I had, probably could have got a pretty decent pic, darn, but this one gives you an idea. The feeder is in front of the Greyhound statue.

We have bird’s nest in our carport.  I just noticed this on Saturday.  They were pretty creative constructing the nest around our chemical bottles.  Have not seen any babies yet, but hope we do.  Birds are so neat, aside from the daily defecating on my car.

We have a wine tasting trip planned with the pups for next weekend, should be fun! It is that time of year for festivals and outdoor fun.  Pippi is ready for an adventure as are Cueball and Ziva.

We hope everyone is well and is having as good of weather as we have had of late!