Another shot, cropped to highlight the highlights.

It looks lovely....now, are you going to show us after the hail....or is it too painful to look at it?

I am so sorry the hail got your garden. I was watching the storms over towards Duncan on the radar and thinking of your garden and hoping the hail will miss you.

At my house, these are the words that I never, ever am allowed to say "The garden is perfect this year. It never has looked better." I guarantee you that if I say those words, the garden will get hit by hail....and not once, but several times.

I should play it safe and tell people "The garden is horrible and ugly this year" just so I won't jinx it and cause it to be hit by hail. I have learned this the hard way, of course. One of my friends, when asked how his garden is doing, will only say "Horrible. Just horrible." I need to follow his lead.

Hoping for a good recovery of the plants in your beautiful garden!

We had ping-pong sized hail, here. The garden was only slightly battered. Banged and battered, but not destroyed.

Dew on the grass this morning...

My garden will never be pretty like yours, but it looked pretty happy this morning. The garden had only been watered a couple of times and was pretty thirsty, it sure is grinning now.

Larry

How do you keep your garden so neat and weed free? it looks beautiful

I always admire gardens in such nice patterns, or rows... but somehow, rows never happen in my yard/garden...

Moni

Well, this garden was in the front of the house, on the street, so it had to look nice, just out of self-respect, if nuthin' else.

As for keeping it neat, we use a mower and a two cycle, 'double throw', line trimmer. I'm still re-learning to use a two cycle line trimmer, and we're still training the grass to accept a little discipline and training. Varying degrees of success with both, so far...

So, if I were going to do all that, I decided to think about it for a bit and plan it all out.

After planning it out, and drawing up the design, I had to lay out all of those straight lines in order to give the garden some structure. The plans call for a lot of fruit bushes around the edges of the garden, with edible plants under them as border plantings. In the design, I wanted to flirt with chaos without creating chaos. All of those textures, shades of colors and light and shadows were in my mind all along. w/o some structure, it would've been overwhelming. w/o the straight lines, your eyes wouldn't know where to look. All you'd see is chaos. That structure is what makes it pleasing to the eyes, even now.

Man, my mind isn't tracking today...

Keeping weeds outta the beds? I walk around the garden two or three times a day and pick a few weeds here and there as I go along. It just takes a few minutes, now and then. Every time I walk through the garden, I pick a few weeds. Two or three times a month, the weeds try to get ahead of me, so I break out the hula hoe for half an hour or so. Repeat as necessary. Easy-peasy. If you wait until the weeds get any more than an inch or so tall? Yeah. You're looking at hard work, there. So...pick 'em when they're small, a few minutes here and a few minutes there, a few weeds here and a few there. No sweat involved. No aching back.

Your garden is very pretty.

Thank you, Sorie. It's taken two years to get to this point. It didn't happen overnight or w/o a lot of sweat and hard work...or w/o a lot of thought and planning. We're only about half done, even now. The good news is that most of the really hard work is finished! It gets much easier from here on out.

I sincerely appreciate every compliment...but what I appreciate most is sitting under the cedar tree, drinking some iced tea and just...relaxing and enjoying it.