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I love your pictures hobbyodlaren. You're right, it does look cold! Here where I live it's getting to be what we consider cold--all the way down to 33 degrees. But that's cold for us! We don't get the beautiful colors on our trees because it doesn't get cold enough. We bought our land (11 1/2 acres) about six years ago and built our house (did it ourselves). We moved into it in July of 2004. Like you, I've planted lots of trees, flowers, shrubs and a nice sized vegetable garden. We lived in a subdivision before this so we're really enjoying our space out here in the country.
Marleine

Just got my peonies from the co op and will plant them this afternoon. Here is a picture of my everloving Smokey Jo who is always in the room when I'm on the computer. He's also in the yard with me when I'm planting or watering. He is the most loving cat I have ever had.

hobbyodlaren, Please post more pictures of your house and gardens. Would love to see a typical Swedish house and what it looks like! Thanks,

Steve

Hi Steve
thanks for the commission. Her are a pic of my house, but I don´t think it is typical Swedish, they say that the house looks like a Danish house.
Swedish typical house are in wood, redpainted with white corner. Sylvia

This is a typical Swedish house in the country. Do you live in an own house with a garden? ~Sylvia

My garden, our son dig a fishpond for our goldfish
~Sylvia

Our son is engine man, works with dig-excavator
So he helps us when we move in here, for our fishes.

That was spring 2007 now the pond looks like this in summer 2008

Sylvia

HI Sylvia, thanks, those are great pictures. Your house and the typical country house are both very pretty :-) Actually your yard and the way your house is positioned is not too different from what one sees here in the U.S.

Most houses in my part of this country are brick, though farther north you see larger numbers of wood houses. Here is my house last April. I have an average house however a large lot, semi-country, on the northwestern edge of a large metropolitan area.

Here is the back.

Here is the back porch, another angle. It gets very hot here during the summertime so we were happy to find a house with a large back porch with overhead fans.

Here is the front during April. We bought the house in 2006 and there was no lanscaping and were no flowers at all, so we had to start from scratch.

Not much tends to be blooming here by late July....

We did have a snowstorm in March, however :-) This is looking out our front door.

Slyvia, nice house. If I didn't know it was in Sweden I would think it was a house in the states. The house in post #5743656 is what we call a dutch colonial style.

Okay Flowerjen ,Dutch colonial style interesting. Here I will show our house we had before our house we have now Post #5743648.

It have two floor. We had a smaller house lot then. Now our house have one floor and much bigger house lot. About 3500 yard2 i think I write in american

We live in this house for 16 years, when our two kids where teenages, now the have move to own apartment and house. A typical smallhouse area in the town.

The backside with the small garden about 500 squareyard

Steve very nice picture of your house and garden, burr burr for the snow, soon we will get snow here I suppose. We have temperatures below zero every night now.

kitten have you leave the thread, is´nt we have nice discussions? :o)

Oh gosh hobbyodlaren, below zero every night?!?! That's way too cold for this southern gal. We seldom get that cold and only get snow about every eight to ten years, which is plenty for us. It's just enough to be pretty and play in for a day and it usually melts before the day is over. Love your house and your yard is beautiful.

Wow, those are neat aerial pictures you've posted, Sylvia. I think you made a good decision buying a house with a lot of room. We lived on a very small city lot just a couple of years ago and the neighbors were so close you could hear everything they said, their kids were always in our yard, etc.

I think our lot is around 9,800 sq meters or about 2.4 acres. Your lot at 3,500 sq yards, similar to 3,500 sq meters, is just under an acre, which is quite large even for this country. In fact, I think an acre or 3,500-4,000 sq meters is just about perfect in size - big enough to spread out but not so large that it is difficult to maintain. We measure house size itself in sq. feet, and a sq. foot is about 1/9 or a sq. yard, which as you state is close to a sq. meter. I think the European process is a lot simpler. You have such a nice setting. I could never go back to living in the city.

Nature, I think she's talking 0 degrees C which is 32 F. Still cold by southern standards, LOL. We get a couple snows a year and some ice storms but like you it does not stick around long.

Duh! I'm sure you're right about hobby meaning 0 C Steve. But you're also right that even 32F is too cold for my liking! When it snows here, we all look like Big Foot by the time we finish getting on all the clothes we can!

Hello Bigfoot, I laughed when I read your comment about the cold and clothes.
Steve I also think it´s nicer to live outside the town. We have no neighbors close now, and I like that.
I our house in town, we also could hear everything neighbors said. I close to our garden there was playground and the day nursery - children play loud there.
He in my garden I hear the birds and bees, it´s nice.

Pic is Rudbeckia 'Green Wizard'

This message was edited Nov 3, 2008 6:52 PM

I agree about it being nicer living out in the country too! Hubby and I used to live in a subdivision and it's amazing how noisy people can get. We're now out in the country and our neighbors aren't too close to us. We love it. We can sit out on the front porch in the evenings and watch the deer feeding in the food plot we put in for them down by the creek. We love it when the does bring out their new spotted fawns. We have resident rabbits, a pair of foxes, and a pair of redtail hawks that nest in the edge of our woods every year.

Oh, stop it, NatureLover!

Linda, who lives in town on 1/4 acre {weeping}

PS. Pic of patio adjoining "garden room." This Leading Edge Babyboomer built that patio herself, pouring the concrete over one summer about 8 years ago. Can ya' tell she's proud of such un-girl-like work???

Here's more of that little space.

twincol . . . I LOVE your patio! Someday we will transform our drab square of concrete to something as warm & inviting. We city dwellers just have to be a little more creative with our space. Do you have any more pics of your patio to post?

I covered this area in concrete to avoid having to water on this side of a concrete block fence. There's a probably-50-year-old Fruitless Mulberry on the other side . . . within 10 feet of the fence. Make sense? {chuckling}

Lastly . . . .

(oooops, couldn't find that stupid pic and spent a bunch of time cruising through all those pic files)

Oh puleeease, jcoakley . . . don't encourage me!

This is a sign from the farm in Bethel, Maine, in which my father was raised. It was obviously a chicken farm -- mostly egg sales. During the Big Depression. When my 86YO mother sold their home 10 years ago I grabbed it to hang out with the birds at my house. Mostly doves and finches. I thought for years that it was simply an oval. But oh no-o-o-o . . . like duh, it's egg-shaped {chuckling}.

Linda

Oops, sorry, that's kinda blurred! Phooey! Well, you get the drift?

I just love the end result of all my work. And am really proud of the outcome.

Thanks for the encouragement.

BTW, Post #5749852 shows a 5+foot rose tree planted in a pot. That pot is so cool. It is cast iron. A half of an old "retired" ocean float.

How cool is that?

Someone up the road from me had a couple of these for sale and I just loved them and saved my pennies to buy it from him.

Pic attached is of my two "MopTops." They are lying on the driveway adjacent to the patio you see, snooping under the gate with the ice cream truck moving slowly down the road. There is, BTW, another yard on the other side of that driveway from the patio. That's my "Olivia's Rose Garden." Olivia is one of the MopTops. They are, BTW, Standard Poodles, since it isn't too obvious from the photo {chuckling}. It is very difficult to photograph black poodles, as their coat absorbs all the light and they turn into inky blobs. I haven't figured out how to adjust the light thingee on my camera yet!

Hmmm, try this jcoakley. This is the patio from dead center, looking out from the deck/landing at the sliding door from my "garden room."

OK, that's it! No more. Thanks again for the encouragement. Linda

edited to add: The concrete pad within the surround of my pavers is 10ft X 10ft, to give you some perspective.

edited once again to add: BTW, hollyodlaren, I live in the Central Valley of California. The temps in the summertime are an average 97F 36C (90-105) with wintertime lows an average 38F 3C. We are actually a desert in the center of California with lots of water brought in by canals and rivers. Much of our water is used for agriculture, as California is one of the nation's top food producing centers of the country. Water availability, drinking and personal use, is always a problem, in that the aquifers are depleted and replenished over time by rain, which is probably less than 10-12 inches annually, which isn't a lot of water as water goes. Now mind you, we also have Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks within 2 hours driving distance, as well. Moreover, we are only 2-2 1/2 hours from the beaches on the Pacific Coast. So, living in the desert isn't such a bad thing. We basically have just about any kind of outdoor entertainment you could want within just a few hours. I used to drive up to Yosemite and ride my bike on Sunday afternoons, returning home for dinner. I mean . . . how good does it get?! aaaahh, more than you would ever want to know . . . .




This message was edited Nov 3, 2008 8:33 PM

This message was edited Nov 3, 2008 9:24 PM

Twincol,
I LOVE your patio! And I don't blame you for being proud of it and the fact that you built it yourself. Hubby and I built our house and shop ourselves so I completely understand that pride factor. Nothing makes you appreciate your "space" quite like doing it all yourself. We just finished our house four years ago and I've been landscaping the yard ever since. One of my next projects will be to finish our patio and you've given me some wonderful ideas. I'm surrounding it with my butterfly garden and I have walkways running through some of the flowerbeds. I've been looking around for some type of stone to use for the walkways and I really like the looks of what you have. That will have to be my project next spring. I also understand about having lots of activities close at hand. I lived in Riverside, CA (actually Sunnymeade) many years ago when I was a mere 19-21 years old. My friends and I used to go to Kings Canyon to camp, hike, etc., to a couple of different mountain areas to sled and just play in the snow, to the beach, rode motorcycles down to Palm Springs--the list of things to do was endless. But I find plenty of things to keep me busy here. One of my favorite things to do is take my camera equipment to the woods for wildlife photography. BTW--there's nothing wrong with having 1/4 acre. It beats the heck out of nothing at all!!

Yeah I am new on here and a lady was asking for advise about black spot and I gave her the advice that I was gave and got lamblasted for it, saying kitchen remmedies are not the thing to be using on your plants, but the advice was given to me from a professonial gardenig place so , I just replied what I knew and told them if they didn't want to use the formula don't. It just beats me that everywhere I have found that I thought I could have good conversations and exchange info ,you find one person that just has to have something to say derogatory about anything that is said.

Sometimes you just have to ignore the sour grapes. By far the majority of the folks on here are very nice. You see how this post started out on a down note but turned into a very enjoyable conversation :-)

BTW flowerfantasy, welcome to DG. Glad to have you and hope all your experiences from here on are wonderful. And there are lots of other folks on here who use home remedies for their plants. Maybe the person who lambasted you isn't aware of organics.

Yes I did see the Change and was very glad for it. There were some beautiful pictures to look at. We have 31/2 acres just outside of town and I love it. Our home and ground are paid for and we are trying to get some flower gardens and trees and things going now that we both will be retired shortly. I have found some very useful info on this site. Was so glad when I found it and then that happens and I thought here we go again, but I feel better since I looked at the pictures and read the conversations. Thanks everybody fot the lift up !!!!!!!!!!!

That was good LOL You know if it hadn't been for organics before scientific stuff , what would a person have don't to get rid of stuff like that LOLOLOL

This message was edited Nov 6, 2008 7:22 PM

Retirement--a wonderful place to be! DH and I both retired about three years ago and are really enjoying it! You're going to love it. A good friend of mine (who retired a couple of years before I did) told me just before I retired, "Marleine, after you retire, you're going to wonder how you EVER got anything done!" After I'd been retired for several months, I called her and said, "I know the answer now--I didn't get everything done. And I still don't!" We're busier now then ever and are enjoying every minute of it. When will you be officially retiring? I'm still working on landscaping our 11 1/2 acres out in the country. It's so fun having so much room for flowers, trees, shrubs, veggies, etc.

My DH retired in June of this year at the age of 66 and I am taking early retirement at 62. I have had back surgery 8 years ago and just recently neck ,as a matter of fact thats why I am on here a lot I am still on med leave. My body is just giving out for the factory work or any other for that matter, so I figure if I retire I can take my time and do what I want ,when I want. LOL I will retire in June hopefully. I know I'm loving being at home with dh. We have gotten a lot done just since I have been able to start doing things since my surgery.

flowerfantasy,
I hear you.My DH retired in 2000 or 200l. I am fine with that,because he really felt he needed to,but because we need a little more to get by on,I'm still trying to work as much as possible.
Not to go into a big sob story...LOL but I have had back surgery,gall bladder,etc, 8 years ago also. And early this year brainstem surgery.I can't get my early retirement until next September.
Wouldn't it be great if we could all just retire when we need to and just be comfortable? I have never cared about wealth,just enough to get by and maybe help out a few others.
But we all do what we gotta do.

Lynn

Wow ,that did sound like I was looking for sympathy.Disregard.Guess I was just venting.
Lynn

Lynn, we all need to talk about our problems now and then and I think all of us here understand, especially us retired folks! DH and I are becoming convinced that when we retired our bodies decided it was time for them to retire too, LOL! I've had several surgeries too, including C-spine here recently so I know what it's like going through all that. As long as our problems are fixable, we're all going to make it. But it's nice to be able to talk with others who are going through the same difficulties as we are.
flowerfantasy--are you having to wear that awful neck brace? I hated that thing and considered is a real good milestone when I was able to take it off for good! After I finished the healing process, I knew it was well worth all I went through to get it fixed. Hope you mend quickly.
Marleine