Flower Friday – Some New Additions

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Dory for Flower Friday.

Let’s start with some wide views of the yard. Then we will zoom in an get some close up views of the flowers.

Here is a quick video panning around the yard from the patio. A lot has changed since the last video like this I posted a month ago.

If you can’t see the video you can go here to view it.

Now let’s take a closer look. (Don’t forget you can always click on an image to see a bigger view)

North West Corner of Yard

In this corner of the yard we have a nice variety of green and red foliage. On the right are some viburnum blooming and in the middle is our Miss Kim Lilac.

Miss Kim Lilac

It’s too bad someone hasn’t invented smell-o-vision yet because the scent from the lilacs is divine.

The perennial garden is looking great!

Most of the plants in the perennial garden survived our harsh winter. Charlie has moved a few things around and added a couple of plants too.

Amsonia ‘Blue Ice’ (Common name: Blue Star)

This Amsonia is one of the new additions in the perennial garden. I love the delicate blue flowers.

North East Corner

The North East corner of the yard shows off the variety of foliage colors in our yard. Let’s move in a little close to see what is in bloom.

Azalea, Rhododendron, Viburnum, Roses and Weigela in bloom.
(from left to right)

I’ve shown you pictures of some of these flowers so lets zoom in on some we haven’t see yet this year.

Pink Rhododendron

One of the new additions in this area are a couple of Yellow Knock Out Roses.

Yellow Knock Out Rose

The roses start out the dark yellow and then fade to a pale yellow as seen above on the left. The weigela flowers are similar in that they start out as a darker pink and then fade to almost white with pink centers.

Variegated Weigela Flowers

To finish today’s tour around the yard we have a Japanese Maple surrounded by two different viburnum.

Japanese Maple with Viburnum on either side

Well I hope you enjoyed this walk around our garden today.

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Wild Bird Wednesday – Turf War

Hi everyone! Wow! Did we have an exciting day last week. On Tuesday, May 19th a pair of male Ruby-throated Hummingbirds waged a fierce all day battle for the rights to our backyard. I noticed them first thing in the morning when I took the dogs out for their bathroom duties.

Let the games begin!

Throughout the day I would glance out the window and see them still going at it.

Get off my feeder!

Occasionally they would both land on the feeder and both would take some sips from the feeder.

A temporary truce for refueling

But that wouldn’t last long and they would be at it again.

Who will be the first to give up?

They were so consumed by their turf battle that I was able to get within about 8 feet to take these pictures. I also took some video of the action that you can see below. The video is a bit long but that was after I cut it down from the 20 clips I took of them. I apologize that the birds aren’t always in the best focus but I wanted to demonstrate how fierce some of the action was. The camera had difficulty focusing on the small birds and instead would focus on the background. If you listen closely you can hear when they hit each other. You can also see that they seem to take turns being the one on the feeder and the one trying to knock the other off.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/129004352]

If you can’t see the video you can go here to view it.

At times one of the birds would be on the feeder.

Whatcha looking at?

While the other was on top of the hook holding the feeder. It seemed that the one on top would not see when the other flew onto the feeder.

Where did he go?

There were brief periods of rest between skirmishes. I caught this picture of them both preening while sitting on the trellis in the perennial garden.

The arrows show where the hummingbirds are sitting.

I was getting exhausted watching this battle going on. It continued all day long until after sundown. (Yes, I turned off the lights in the kitchen and looked out at about 8:30 pm to see them still going at it) The next day only one male hummingbird remained. I would like to think the loser of the battle flew on to find his own territory.

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Wild Bird Wednesday and will take some time to stop by the blog hop host too.

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Tasty Tuesday – Review Time

Hi everyone! It’s Millie and Walter here. Oh boy are we excited! You will never guess who emailed our mom a few weeks ago. Well if you guessed Miss Sydney from Chewy.com you are right! She wanted to know if we wanted to join the Chewy.com review team. It took us all of about 2 seconds to scream YES! We’ve seen so many of our friends review all sorts of tasty treats and were beginning to feel a bit left out, but we won’t feel left out any longer. Here is our first review for Chewy!

Look what landed on our door step!

Our mom selected some snacks for us and in a couple of days this package was dropped off at our door. We of course sounded the alarm as we always do when things get dropped off at the door. Our mom told Miss Sydney to address the package to us since we are doing the taste testing.

It’s even addressed to us!

Inside that package was a bag of Wellness Core Superfood Protein Bars Beef & Bison with Blueberries.

We couldn’t wait to give them a taste but of course mom made us pose with them first.

Even with the bag closed they smell great!
I think I can taste them through the bag.

Mom please open the bag I can’t wait another second!
He is such a drama king.

After what seemed like forever (about 2 minutes) mom let us have a taste.

I ate mine so fast mom almost missed the picture.

I’m drooling these are so good.

It took mom a few tries to get some pictures of us eating those treats. We sucked them down so fast she missed the shot most of the time.

Each piece is about and inch or so square

 

According to the Chewy.com website, “These nutrient-dense protein nuggets are packed with quality animal protein, without fillers or grains, along with wholesome superfoods. Each tender bite delivers an incredibly healthy and exceptionally tasty way to treat your dog.” All we know is they taste great!

We give these treats 8 paws up for our highest rating. We were not paid for our review but were supplied one package of these treats for our honest review. Thanks Miss Sydney for letting us join the Chewy.com review team. We can’t wait for next month.

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Flower Friday – Azaleas and more

Hi everyone! It’s Walter here and I’m joining Dory for Flower Friday again.

Let me take you on a little tour around our back yard. As the title indicates we have some azaleas blooming now. Here is a close up of our dark pink azalea.

In the back corner we have a little hedge of red azalea.

Right near the red ones we have some light pink azaleas too.

In addition to the azalea we have lots of viburnum in bloom. Here are a few of them.

Korean Spice Viburnum

Doublefile Viburnum

Snowball Viburnum

Last but not least the perennial garden is filling in and starting to bloom too.

There is a lot of green but if you look closer you can see what is in bloom.

Purple Lily of the Valley

Perennial Geranium flowers

These geraniums don’t have much smell to them.

Well I hope you enjoyed this walk around our garden today. I’m sure there will be more to show you next week.

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Save Those Stamps!

Hi everyone! Do you remember, back around the end of the year holidays, when I asked everyone to save your stamps and send them to me? I waited a while to make sure everyone that was planning on sending me their stamps had enough time to do so and was overwhelmed by the response.

Wow! Just look at everything I received. In addition to the stamps there were numerous cards and notes. There even were a couple of dollars and some unused US stamps from a Canadian friend. After I sorted through all the stamps I took the time to remove all the stamps on all the envelopes too.

Unique stamps from the United States

Most of the stamps were the usual holiday or general use United States stamps but as I was sorting through the stamps I pulled out a few of the unique ones.

Australian Stamps

Thanks to The Cowspotdogs, whose mom is from Australia, there were a lot of stamps from down under.

Interesting International Stamps

There were even a few interesting stamps from around the globe. I had fun perusing all the different stamps that you sent and couldn’t believe how many stamps there were.

In all the stamps weighed in at 12¼ ounces (about 346 grams).

Of course I couldn’t ship off the stamps before making Millie and Walter pose with them. Don’t they look thrilled?

Do you need me to lick any of these stamps mom?

I stuffed all the stamps into a gallon zip bag.

All these stamps are going to help greyhounds in the UK?

The stamps were shipped using US First Class International postage which still allows for tracking. I included a note to let the RGT know where all the stamps came from. Here is what I said:

Dear Retired Greyhound Trust,

Enclosed please find stamps collected by me and about 30 blogging friends and family. Most of these stamps were collected during the December 2014 holiday season. A large group of pet bloggers participate in a holiday card exchange. In the past one of our members had asked us to save our stamps and send them to her so she could send them to your organization. That particular blogger doesn’t blog any longer so I decided to pick up where she left off.

The majority of those participating write a pet related blog so they were more than happy to help a pet related cause such as yours. I promoted the cause on my blog and some of the other participants promoted it on their blog as well. I plan on encouraging my fellow bloggers to save their stamps year round. We know it is a small gesture but we all know that every little bit helps.

As you can see from my note there were about 30 different participants in the stamp collection.

The package was mailed on May 2^nd and I was surprised to see that it was delivered in just 5 days!

Thank You Letter from Retired Greyhound Trust

Just this weekend I received a thank you note so I know they received them. I’m sure they appreciated receiving all our stamps. Thanks to everyone who participated. I think that some of our UK and European bloggers sent their stamps directly to the RGT so thanks to all of you too.

I want to let you know that you can save your stamps all year round. I already have my collection started to send next year. If you don’t want to wait you can feel free to send me your stamps any time of the year. I created a permanent page on my blog with all the information you need to participate.

Thanks again to all of you for making this so successful.

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Millie Monday!

Hi everyone! It’s Millie here.

Do you know what day it is? Let me give you a hint.

That’s right…it’s my birthday! Today I turn 3 years old. My pawrents can’t believe I can be 3 already. I hope mom bakes me a cake like the one above. I might even be nice and share some with Walter too.

Check out the cute e-card I got from my VET!

The weather is a little nicer today (we had record temps of 90º F during the past few days) so I expect to be hanging out in the yard and snoopervising my dad’s yard work.

Since this is supposed to be Mischief Monday mom found this video of me from the first day I came to my forever home. It is cell phone video and until recently she couldn’t get it to play right side up. The quality isn’t as good as our regular videos and there are some glitches but I think you will enjoy it.

If you can’t see the video or want to see a larger version you can go here to see it.

As you could see I was very fierce and ready to take on anyone who was in my yard even if they didn’t move. You can’t see what I’m barking at very well so here is a picture of it from last year in the garden.

German Shepherd Dog Sculpture

It’s in a new location now and I don’t even notice it any more. Doesn’t that sculpture look scary to you?

Well I hope you all have as nice a day as I’m having.

Happy Birthday to Me!

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Flower Friday – Daffodil Days

Hi everyone! We finally have something to post for Flower Friday with Dory.

We’ve had an amazing stretch of warm sunny weather which has made our yard come alive.

The perennials are popping out of the ground

Japanese maple trees starting to leaf out and Service Berry shrubs in bloom

Service berry blossoms

Service berry tree in bloom

The birds will be happy when all those service berry flowers turn into fruit.

The stars of the backyard show right now are our daffodils.

A beautiful clump of yellow daffodils

A close up of the yellow daffodils

All white daffodils

Multiple daffodils blossoms on a single stalk

I love this daffodil that produces multiple blossoms on each stalk. The flowers are small and delicate. Besides the daffodils one of the perennials that is an early bloomer has just started to flower.

Bleeding heart blooms

Another shrub that’s an early bloomer is one of our spirea.

A cascade of spirea blooms

As you can see many of the trees have not leafed out much yet.

A view of the north side of the yard (with Millie too)

The Katsura tree

The Katsura tree has leafed out nicely to provide some welcome shade.

Well I hope you enjoyed this walk around our yard. We’ve had a lot of dry days but the weather peeps tell us we are going to get some needed rain soon.

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