Tiegan's Bouquets

I haven't had much luck so far this year with getting the kids to help out in the garden. Sure, they love to eat from the garden, and they are happy to show it off to their friends and talk about it at school, but when it comes to actual work … not so much.

A possible exception to this trend was Tiegan's flower picking yesterday:


She made a very tiny but pretty bouquet of … dandelions. It won't last long, but it looks very nice (and I like her addition of the ribbon around the vase). In addition to underscoring the need for a bona fide cutting garden, this little bouquet actually does help us out with the garden. The more dandelions that get picked before they go to seed, the fewer dandelions we will have to worry about in the lawn and garden. I'm not too hyped up about digging every root out the lawn (they are green, after all), but last spring we had a field full of dandelions in our back yard before the Bobcat came, and I'm not anxious to see that happen again — especially after all the trouble we went to to get the lawn established last summer. As it is, we seem to have lots of dandelion seeds in the garden beds that were filled with soil from the yard, and it may take us a few seasons of turning soil and pulling up baby dandelions before we get past that (if it is, in fact, possible to get past dandelions at all).

Another flower picked from the lawn:


Lots of these white squill bulbs (with small blue stripes) were also in the back yard before we dug it up, and many of them survived the whole ordeal. Because their leaves look more or less like grass, I don't mind these naturalizing in the lawn. And they smell really wonderful — I think they smell like grapes; Tiegan says like honey. Either way, having them in a small vase on the dining room table puts them where we can enjoy their scent.

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