Garden of Galadriel

The past few weeks we've been teaching our dog the command "hush" for barking. She responds well when it's someone at the door, but when we take her walking, she doesn't want to hush. I understand this particular training can take a month or even more. It's rather embarrassing to be walking along and for her to see a bicyclist or another dog on a leash and for her to yap and howl and try to bolt off after it. She also has another embarrassing trick to run all the way across the football field just to bark at some random walker and then run all the way back. In that case, however, I pretend she doesn't belong to me.

I bought some material at Ikea today to make drapes for my big sliding door. I've never exactly made curtains, but I figure it's just some really long seams and hems. I'm not having anything fancy. Now that it's winter, we notice the sliding door lets a lot of cold in. We did have some other drapes up for a while, but the curtain pole was quite flimsy, and then the drapes themselves weren't made to those measurements so they didn't quite cover it all. At the moment I have a very simple gingham valance up. These drapes will fit in behind it.

I'm slowly working my way through tidying the front garden. It's not big at all: maybe 15'x10', and a good portion of it is grass (and moss--the lawn doesn't get much sun), but it has borders on all four sides and all of them are choked with grass and brambles. During the summer it wasn't that noticeable because of the wildflowers, but now it just looks very unkempt. I've done two of the narrow-sided borders, though I haven't made much of an effort to dig up all the grass roots; there are a lot of established bulbs I don't want to disturb. In the spring, I get multitudes of daffodils, then tulips in those narrow beds. This picture of the narrow bed next to the drive was taken three years ago in April.