Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point

Every year around this time I find the need to go see something breathtakingly beautiful.

Maybe it is because school is in its last month, and it is hard to do the home stretch of school for some teachers....Like me.   I hate it and I love it at the same time when school comes to an end.

 You can probably guess why I love it, summer vacation and all..... but I hate it too.  It's like a fun party that is now over. That's how it feels for me.  I love my job. I love teaching little kids. It's the greatest job on earth. 

 Even though mine is WAY down on the list of The 100 Best Jobs in America.....CHECK it out! My job, Elementary school teacher, #92, isn't as good as a Funeral Director's, but is a tad better than a sewage plant operator! LOL

This year will be particularly hard for me because I've taught most of  these darling kids for 2 years and I love them all. 

So I go to find beauty in the world somewhere......and here it is at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah.

If you need a lift....go see a beautiful flower garden....it will  light up your life!  JUST LOOK AT IT!!!  

How could you not feel joy looking at yards and yards of this? 

As I walked from one garden to another I kept thinking, "Well, now THIS one is my favorite....no, no....now THIS one is!" 

 I had planted tulips in my own garden for the first time this year...and they came up as such a lovely surprise just after winter....right as the last snow was just melting....

But the deer in our neighborhood found them a week later and ate all the beautiful, red tops off!!! 

Now I'm just left with the leaves and stems....it's pretty funny looking....

But these tulip gardens are simply breathtaking, and there is a glorious  riot of color everywhere....

I love it at Thanksgiving Point Tulip Festival....it's only at the beginning of April every year....it lasts for just a few weeks!

And then it is gone.  Just like Spring in Utah. I dragged the hubs even though he has a bad knee and can't walk for long...

But he is such a trooper anyway because he knows how much I love being there....

It's like Disneyland for a flower lover.....

In the gift shop I loved this wall of clocks.....everything was very expensive there.....We saw an $8,000 couch.  Yeah, I don't think we will be buying our furniture there....

I think this was my true favorite....purple, white and red.....

Did I tell you red was my favorite color? 

We got a nice stranger to snap this pic...the hubs and I. 

Then we drove out to Wendover the the Peppermill Concert Hall to see Dana Carvey's comedy show. Gotta love the church lady.  It was so funny I  laughted till I cried! These kinds of things make life worth livin.....
Beauty and Laughter...2 of the best things in life. 

Backyard Terrace Before and After

We have seriously neglected our backyard for the last few years. We were busy remodeling a kitchen and basement and bedrooms last year and the previous years. We had to redo floors and paint walls and remodel in the summer. So somethings gotta give, right? Yeah, it was the backyard. I just ignored it and let it grow wild!

Seriously neglected backyard terraces

Terraced  gardens  & grapevines...what a "before" mess!  Ugh!! 

Much better Backyard gardens "after" all the work....

Lillies just starting to bloom! Woo HOO!  

We added Solar Fence Post Caps in copper...they light up at night...super COOL! 

These you can get from Lowes or Home Depot. Or check out my store for NIGHT LIGHTS, all kinds of wonderful solar lighting items for some beautification of your backyard or patio or deck!!!

 

This is definitely the BEFORE PICTURE of our flagstone steps! YUCK!  Can you believe it?  Not really...no....

The backyard stairs were done about 5 years ago with flagstone. They looked really good the first year, but after that all kinds of stuff grew all around and in between the rocks and it looked awful.
Then the neighbor's cement fence post fell on it. He was going through some financial woes, so we knew he couldn't pay to have it fixed. Murphy's Law. I knew there would be a reckoning day where from neglect we'd have to do all that WEEDING! And fixing! Oh CRAP! Do I HATE yard work? Yes, I do.

Not perfect....but definitely an improved "after" picture....

So anyway THIS was the year we had to do it. Soooooo,  we started on the middle terrace and pulled all the weeds and roto-tilled it, and added some soil amendment to it. Then we started our summer garden after all the snow in May melted. We had snow until the end of May! We had a very late start to Spring this year!

gardening stuff....just getting ready to do all that WORK!  

                               

Well, if you are like us and have a climate that gets SNOW like ours does, you need to do the requisite sprinkler repair every single solitary year. What the heck happens with sprinklers anyway. Is it some kind of evil conspiracy that a fifth of them need to be replaced every other year? So of course we had to fix like a GAZILLION sprinklers! What is up with those constantly breaking sprinkler heads? Don't love those things. So I'll be busy working on those for the next week or so. And in the meantime, check out my veggie garden . It's just coming together! 

One of the little loves of my life, my granddaughter Josie! She  just turned 2! 

We had put in lots of fruit trees years back and they are finally starting to produce....not lots of stuff mind you...maybe a dozen fruits per tree....but it's yummy and very fascinating to watch those trees just do their "thang".

I have a big selection of gardening gloves. I like to use them whenever I'm weeding so I don't destroy my fingernails too badly. I have some washable cheaper ones I use when I'm watering or in wet mud. Then I just throw them in the laundry bin. I think I've got about 7 pairs of gloves now. It does help me want to go out and weed the yard if I have nice tools.

aPrIcOtS

We also have an apple tree, a peach and nectarine tree and an apricot tree.  None of them ever have done really well except the apple.  I think our soil is just too sandy.  We have a pond in the backyard too and it looked just dreadful and it was clogged and yucky.  So we had to redo that too.  And neither one of us are "garden" people.

Ya gotta have some wind chimes.....

 We are lazy weeders.  I just want it to look good and I want to have fresh veggies...... and beautiful things everywhere....but I don't want to worry about it! I don't ask for much do I?

We added flowers under the deck for he first time too...Hydrangeas in the SHADE!!! 

The garden looks a WHOLE lot better here in the after picture... we've got tomatoes too! 

We repainted the deck. It was quite a sight! We used that new RESTORE paint. Check out my post on the deck too. 

Here's how it looks now....its fun to go out and BBQ again! Woopie!

It's fun to see pay dirt on all our hard work....now it's fun to go outside again!
I think we figured out the secret....just to do a little bit every few days...it was discouraging at first....but seeing it get better over time...(and still a ways to go) has been very rewarding.  And maybe...just maybe I'm not such a black thumb after all!