At least there's purple

When I was a little girl and we had to repair the house from a major hurricane (Andrew) my parents let me pick my furniture AND carpet. One of those was the wrong decision, namely the carpet choice. I wound up with totally rad 90's pearl plastic furniture with gold plate trim. That was the good decision (if you compare the two). The bad decision: 5 year old me chose PINK carpet. Yeah, and even worse my parents actually purchased and had that pink carpet installed. To this day that pink carpet is in my room at my parents house. 

Moving on from the pink, when I went away to college my Mom reminded me that I could choose whatever colors I wanted for my new dorm room decor, that I could finally get away from the dreaded pink. Thinking I was coming up with a somewhat original idea, I chose purple. I've continued to carry on my (new found?) love for purple to this day. I still have much of my dorm room decor, though I'm proud to say it's also accompanied by a lot of CraigsList finds. So while I enjoy purple, new and old, my house does not scream dorm room or 5 year old little girl. (I think Zoë's Dad would not let me make our home "5 year old little girl" even if I wanted to, thankfully I don't.)

So this love of purple has continued in to my gardening. Ha, there was a reason for that story! Amazingly enough most of my flower favorites are not purple (what!?! I know, that's crazy) I do tend to gravitate to pops of purple color when looking around the store at flowers. With a $10 off $50 purchase coupon at Lowe's today, we tried coming up with a few extra items (read: flowers) to fill up the $25 we needed to spend to use the coupon. While I didn't want to spend that much at the store we both knew the chances of spending $50 in one trip at Lowe's might not happen again until Christmas (and we get our Christmas tree there). We left with a bag of human/pet friendly fire ant killer goodness, a can of spray paint for the last tire planter, a big ole bag of potting soil (for the last tire planter), and 2 plants. Zoë's Dad insisted on getting a Kimberly Fern that he's going to try to split and plant around the front of our house where the big trees block almost all sunlight from coming through. 

We still needed a tiny bit more to spend, and as is always the case when that happens, we over spent. That's right I chose to purchased a $14 flat of Angelonia angustifolia to finish off the purchase. I tried to pull up more info on these beauties on my new iPhone to reason getting them. I found that they're perennials in zones 10-11, only problem being that I'm in zone 8b/9. We'll keep our fingers crossed and maybe if we're really lucky they'll survive the winter. If not I'm hoping $14 for 8-10 plants was a good enough deal for annuals. Getting past the money I'd just spent I went to work on planting said purple flowers. Remember those free containers from CraigsList? Well I was happy to finally put most of them to use. Of course the flat I bought was actually 2 rows and not individual plants. So off I went to vent off some anger through my spade and "splitting" the rows in to individual plants. I'll tell you what, those roots had built up good and strong and all along the bottom of the plastic temporary containers. It wasn't as easy to split them as I thought it'd be. But I did split them and now they have homes in individual pots instead of all together in a row. Even if they only last for this summer or part of this summer they'll give a splash of purple to the tire planter garden. 

Oh, speaking of my tire planter garden look at the growth of my wildflower seeds. I was especially worried when I hadn't seen any baby sprouts. But thankfully some time this past week they finally started sprouting. They're all teeny tiny but they're there. And if I'm really lucky they'll actually go from baby sprouts to seedlings and then flowers. 

Zoë insisted on being out in the garden with me as I was gardening. Of course like the little princess she is, as soon as she saw what I was doing she was done being outside. So she spent her time outside under the overhang on the deck. That wasn't the only thing she did while outside. No, of course she had to do her most favorite thing to do outside (newly discovered favorite, about 3 weeks ago): eating sunflower seeds/sunflower shells from the bird feeder that have been discarded and thrown to the ground from the bird feeder! That's right, if you let Zoë outside and she lingers even a minute more than usual you just know what she's doing. As far as we can tell it hasn't made her sick, but little 5 pound Yorkies are not meant to eat (large quantities of) sunflower seeds.

"Eating sunflower seeds and sunflower shells is my favorite!" - Zoë 

All done with that and still feeling like I had more I had to do while it was still the weekend I worked on the last tire planter that needed to be painted. We tried something different since the last attempt with regular spray paint was ... well it was less than stellar. We tried applying a made for plastic spray paint primer and then the spray paint. I can't quite tell if it worked real well or not but since I wasn't the one that painted it (thank you FAMU School of Architecture for teaching my boyfriend, through his many projects, how to spray paint well) I'll call it a success. See our newest addition:

 

Hello 2010 Garden, you're really starting to shape up to be beautiful!

P.S. Thanks to my amazing co-workers I've got a gift card to Native Nurseries burning a hole in my pocket. Unfortunately since Zoë's Dad is in crunch time for finishing off all his work (since it's due Wednesday) I realized I have to wait to use it for next  weekend. Which of course made me feel bad about spending money at Lowe's when I have a gift card at Native Nurseries. But some things are still cheaper and better to get elsewhere (Lowe's). Next weekend though I will be purchasing a pretty flower hanging basket, maybe a few more small flowering plants and whatever else looks good and I might actually use.