Natural Beauty

I discovered the hard working honey bee on one of my onion flowers the other day. It was a bright blue, crisp air kind of day. A perfect day for a bee to be collecting the last bits of pollen for the upcoming winter.

Fairy Garden

I have been saying all summer that I was going to post about my fairy garden, and since Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of summer I figure I better get after it. I have been so inspired by all the fall decorations on everyone's blogs that I feel a bit behind. So here goes.

This is the before, this little paper bark birch tree has been here for the past 4 years all by its lonesome. So with Hubbies man power we dug out the lawn and got the shape just right. This is the before...

...and here is the after. There is not much color in it this year. I will work on that next year with pansies and columbine. But for now here we are. We moved two huge hostas from the front yard and divided them. We ended up with 10 plants from those two. That tells you how big they were

This is birdbath/feeder that my mother-in-law gave me for my birthday. It is a perfect addition to a fairy garden don't you think?

Here is Henry the turtle who stands guard in the garden, making sure nothing naughty gets in. Doesn't he look fierce!

We also put in a few little houses for the fairies to take up residence in! This is one that we moved from another flower bed. The kids and I found some cute houses at the Dollar Store and painted them up for the little fairies.

My mom make this pretty totem from various glass pieces that she found on her junkin days. It adds some sparkle to the garden, just what fairies love, sparkle!

Here is one of the houses that the kids painted. We also found smooth river stones at the Dollar Store. Who knew you could find those kinds of things there. So we made little fairy paths around the garden.

This is just a cute little trinket that we added for some whimsy. You know fairies are all about frolicking and whimsy!

Hope you enjoyed the tour. I will add more next summer and see where it goes.

Nature is Fun!

I decided it was time to get out of the house and go do a little hiking. We went to the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge to do a little bird watching, hiking, and plant identification. What we found was a huge project to turn the area back into a natural estuary and trucks were removing all the dikes and trails. Great for all the birds, but very very sad for us. That was one of the best places in our area to go "birding." You could see Bald Eagles, Kingfishers, Red-Winged Blackbirds, and even beautiful Wood Ducks. I am so sad that it will not be available to the public. Although it is not accessible to us anymore, we still had a lot of fun. Addison even said, "Nature sure is fun!" I think she is right!