The Chocolate Flower Farm

This weekend we headed north to Anacortes and Whidbey Island for a little vacation. The weather was perfect! We stayed at a dog friendly B&B, Island Tyme, right outside of the little town of Langley on the southern end of Whidbey Island. Diva Dog seemed to enjoy her time on the beach! We also did some hiking.

Double Bluff Beach, Useless Bay

Mt. Rainier

The woods at Greenbank Farm

Island Tyme B&B

For more photos of our trip, click this link to our Whidbey Island photo albumn on Ofoto.

While in Langley we visited the Chocolate Flower Farm which is a small specialty nursery. They specialize in dark flower/foliage plants including some that smell like chocolate. They also make chocolate candles and soap. Of course we couldn't leave without acquiring a few more plants for our garden!

Penstemon raven

Euphorbia tasmanian tiger and blackbird

Ribbon grass be gone!

Wing Nut prepares to tackle the ribbon grass.

One down...

... and one to go.

The ribbon grass in its new home.

The ribbon grass is replaced by rudebekia, variegated sage and a variegated hebe.

Here are the latest pepper pictures!

Sunflowers

These are the chianti sunflowers.

Peppers and more peppers!

Last week was very cool and rainy. This week we've had a couple of days in the 80s and the peppers are responding. We have more peppers than we can count!

Here are some pictures of the garden patch next to the patio. We didn't do a veggie garden this year due to sewer problems we had back i n January. Instead, we planted some seed packets we had. The nasturtiums are doing really well. Next to the purple potatoes (in the pot) you can see some little deep red flowers. These are corn flowers.

At the other end of the garden patch are the rhubarb and bronze fennel. Wing Nut is stilll apologizing to the rhubarb for having said it was dead and we should yank it out. It did look pretty sad when R & N first brought over the cuttings from their garden. And it did die back pretty completely before springing back to life.

The sedum on the hillside garden is starting to turn pink. It took some serious persistance to convince Wing Nut to put in some sedum. We found this dark purple sedum at our local Fred Meyer. It's called "postman's pride" for the Belgian postman who found it growing in his garden.

This stump sits at the bottom of our hillside garden. Wing Nut captured the play of light one evening as the sun was setting.

My mommas have melons!

The melons have absolutely nothing to do with our garden, but since Annoying Little Creature struck a pose and the title line instantly popped into my head, I decided to run with it. Melons were on sale at our grocery store this weekend.

It's a perfect sunny summer day. The Blue Angels are in town for Seafair. We heard them thundering by overhead earlier today. Seafair is a huge local summer festival that takes place around Lake Washington. Besides the air show there is also the Chevrolet Cup which features hydroplanes, the fastest boats in the world, racing along the surface of Lake Washington. They are freaky looking crafts.

Here's the weekly pepper update. They are big! I bet they'll start turning red this week. It turns out that all the varieties we put in will ripen to red. We can't get over how big the plants have gotten. The peppers we grew last year never got half this size.

Any guesses as to what's growing in the pot with the pretty lavender flowers? It's purple potatoes!

This week the hibiscus bloomed on the hillside garden. It was spectacular.

And then there is the ribbon grass... Well, we said we'd be sharing gardening fiascoes too. The ribbon grass hasn't become a fiasco quite yet. But we are planning on removing it this evening, before it does become a fiasco! It's growing way too fast and we fear it is living up to it's classification as a noxious weed. We have some lovely variegated sage to put in it's place.