June 1.

June 1. Already. Time sure is flying...

Today is our anniversary...we celebrated by going to breakfast then having a date at the local home and garden store where we bought shade plants for the border along our back fence. It turned out lovely...ferns, hostas, astilbe, scotch moss, sedum, a few succulents and a huge fuschia that now hangs in a rusty planter attached to the back fence.

I dug up two azaleas that just weren't doing well in the same shade border and replanted them in a pot. They are now living in our nursery area in hopes that I can nurse them back to health and eventually find them a new home in the garden.

There were also two society garlic's in the shade garden that were fine and healthy, just never bloomed. So those got planted along the chicken coop fence where there's morning sun. Two wasn't enough (you know, the whole design thing where odd numbers are better) so we dug up a third from the front yard (from an area that will eventually be a hydrangea hedge...sometime in the fall, I'm thinking) and added it, too.

This whole spruce up started when we finally planted our mandarin tree...in the ground...on Saturday morning. The mandarin was a gift from Chris to me either last Mother's Day...? Or the one before, dare I admit? Either way...the poor thing has been in a black plastic pot for far too long. So, yesterday, we committed and stuck that sucker in the ground.

(Apparently, we have commitment issues?)

But really what it's always been with this house is that we thought of it as "temporary" for too long. It was our "starter home"...uh, 16 years ago. Each time we thought to do something permanent to make it nice we'd talk ourselves out of it saying, "No. Let's not waste the money. We're going to move anyway."

But we didn't move. And things didn't get done. So now...we're doing things. We're planting things in the ground. We're making a commitment to our little house to love it and take care of it. And I gotta admit...it's growing on me.