I am not a huge fan of pansies, but this color combination was so pretty that I bought a six-pack. Christa at Tenney Farm told me it was a color combination called “wine and cheese” and the name is perfect!
With the dark purple and burgundy “wine” colors and the light yellow for the “cheese” this 6-pack is quite pretty.
Pansies come in small containers and are a pain to plant and they only like the cool weather so don’t look good into Summer. I just find them a waste of time usually, but they are pretty if planted correctly.
I also bought some very small Pansies / violets and planted them by the side of the driveway. I have a very rocky area there and can’t dig down too deep so it’s the perfect place to put something small like that.
Two days ago I took this photo of my recent encounter with the New England black fly.
It visits us each Spring and I soooooo look forward to becoming deformed by it’s bite. Apparently only a lucky few of us are affected with swelling from the bites and I am lucky enough to be one of those people. Not every bite swells like this one that resulted from one bite on my upper arm. Some of them only swell to 1/3 this size, and some remain a single red blotch and don’t swell at all.
I’ve been told that only the females bite, or is it the males? And also, someone said I will probably build up a tolerance so the bites won’t swell so badly. I’ve tried regular bug spray, but it doesn’t work at keeping the black flies away.
UPDATE: Finally I found bug spray that works at keeping the black flies away. Unfortunately I didn’t discover it until just before I moved away, but the Eucalyptus Lemon Bug Spray (paid link) works on No-see-ums too, which we have here in Florida.
I have yet to figure out why some of the bites become giant red, itchy blotches. I wake up in the night and just have to scratch all of them. Between fly bites and hot flashes I am really not sleeping well lately.
Working in the yard has become a battle. I must dress in long sleeves, gloves and head-net (paid link), which are adorable, and even then they will crawl inside my clothes and bite. My stomach presently has a 4 inch wide red mark where a bug crawled under my shirt to nip me.
I feel compelled to get outside on nice days and get some gardening done so I endure the bites, but I am counting the days until the miserable pests disappear for another year.
If you are into homeopathic healing, Apis Mel, tablets and gel works great.
One thing I have noticed is that they will not follow me indoors. I can be inside the garage or the woodshed – with doors wide open – and never get any black flies near me. If they end up inside my car, they fly near the windows trying to escape, but don’t bother me. They are so tiny. How do they know the difference between indoors and outside?
For me, it’s a good idea to be outside when the black flies are less active, which is early in the morning and late in the day. Thankfully they are gone by the beginning of June.
This is the first time that I’ve grown hyacinths in my yard.
Last fall I bought a bunch of bulbs to add to my new yard and planted tulips, a few daffodils and six hyacinth bulbs.
I put everything out front except the hyacinths and they have their own little garden area near the back deck. The package of bulbs said they were a “mix” of colors and then showed blue, pink, red, yellow, orange, purple and white flowers on the packaging, but as you can see I did not get any but pink, white and purple.
Still, they are pretty and a couple of the plants made two flower stems so I cut off one of the flowers to bring the fragrance inside.
I may get more to plant next Fall and add them out front.
