Spring in the desert

Our desert here is EXPLODING with color right now.  It's been several years since I've seen this much color!  Fortunately, my allergies ARE NOT bothering me, but other folks are pretty miserable.

 Lots of cacti blossoms

 Pretty yellow flower

 Palo verde tree

desert verbena

Garden center

I drove up to our local garden center Sunday morning, since I hadn't been up there for over a month.  I wanted to buy some cosmos and zinnia seeds.  They didn't have any that I wanted.  Instead, they had some strange looking cosmos and NO zinnia seeds.  But, camera in hand, I wandered around and enjoyed seeing all their plants!  :-)

Why can't I grow roses like these?  I've given up on roses.

Roses

These are not my roses.  I simply cannot grow roses.  I've tried and tried over the last 40 years...sigh...
These are at the Palm Desert civic center park.  They had to pull out their old ones and replant them, so these are only a year old...they look pretty tired right now.

It wasn't all ice at the nursery

Well, it wasn't ALL ice up at our local nursery this week!  I love to find water on flowers...so pretty!

Ice at the local nursery

It was 21 degrees here in our valley two mornings ago.  This morning it was 34 degrees on the front porch here at home.  I'm keeping an eye on my sunflower seedings.  They didn't like the cold and most of them are bent.  I hope they survive.

I went up to our local nursery that morning.  This is what I found at 8:30 that morning...

Some garden color (FINALLY!)

I bought a couple new daisy plants this weekend because one of them that I bought at Lowe's died.  YES!  Already!  I also found a red verbena, which the butterflies and hummingbirds will enjoy!  I added 3 other blue daisy-type plants, so I now have a variety of color!  And, the lavender is starting to open up and bloom!   Life is good!

TA DA!

More flowers for the front yard

I went back to the nursery center yesterday and bought 4 more snapdragons, 1 mint, and 2 verbena.  Now the garden looks pretty full and I think I'm set for the season.  I also bought 3 packages of miniature sunflower seeds which only grow to be 2-3 feet tall.  These will make a nice hedge against the railroad ties raised bed, I believe.  I also planted the 7 cabbage plants that were leftovers from Friday.  All 125 of our 3rd graders got to take home a cabbage plant, but there were about 15 leftovers, so I took 7 and put them in the raised bed.  I planted the mint in the middle of them, so maybe it will keep some pests away!

Here are some photos of the newest plants:

 Verbena

 Snapdragon

Snapdragon next to the daisies