Pictures of the Garden and the Future Library

As a follow up to the Backyard Pictures Blog below, here's a current picture of my backyard.

Since you can barely see the back of the long yard in the first picture, here is a close up of some of the trees in the back of the yard. There are ten trees in the back half of the yard.

Just for Kim and Michael, here is one of the many baby peaches we have growing in the backyard.


The new bat house! In Texas, there are many bats, and bats are very good. Every bat eats its body weight in insects every night, and don't harm people or plants or anything. This bat house is still empty; I hope it to become occupied sometime in the next year. It's a tiny house, but about 75 bats can easily live in it.

Beautiful new spring oak tree leaves in my backyard.

And here's something my tree is just getting old enough to do, make these green ball things. I'm sure they have to do with making baby trees, but other than that I don't have any idea what they are.

This is my smaller garden plot. This garden has a decorative grass, camera right, belonging to Alex. The rest of the garden I cleaned out this winter, and last month sprinkled with a bag of native wildflower seeds. The plants are coming in nicely and soon we should have a variety of local flowers.

The strawberries are in season. We get several a day this time of year.

This is my new naval orange tree. I've always wanted citrus-in-a-pot. :-) Here you can see the baby oranges that are growing this season.

We are going to create a library in our upstairs loft -- the open area at the top of the stairs. The bookshelves will be simple. Like this one, however, with no crown on top, because we will be putting multiple bookcases together. We will get that rounded shape on the top lip, though.

Here are some other bookcases that our bookcase-maker makes. They are simple, and picture that they will be stained a much darker color. I wanted this wonderful around-the-corner piece, but it didn't fit nicely into our floorplan.

Here is the half of the loft / library that we will leave semi-intact. The children's kitchen will be moved and the one bookcase that we own now will go in that location. The chairs will remain where they are.

Here's a view of the other side of the room. The white shelf at standing eye level will come down, the small bookcase currently seen on the left will be moved away. In that space, on the left wall, and the space to the left of the window, there will be three 26" matching bookcases. Two on the left wall, intersecting with one more on the window wall. There will be 11" of dead space between the bookcases in the corner, so visually the bookcases will continue straight from one wall to the other. Then, with the 4th bookcase on the right of the window as I said before, it will be almost 2 solid walls of bookcases! I'm so excited.

Right now we can fill about half of it with our books, board games, DVDs, and, well, more books. I really like learning out of books, can you tell? The rest of the space is for future books, especially for the kids now that Alex can read and Sam's coming along, and for display items that I never get to display. I also want to have space to display books cover-front periodically in the bookcase, to make them easier to spot and more enticing to the reader. This will make a great third room (besides TV room downstairs and computer room in master bedroom) where people can rest and be without a tv or computer monitor in the room. Homeschooling can also half take place in the library, instead of all in the master bedroom at my desk like we do it now. I know I'll love it, since I've ALWAYS wanted a wall of books, but I also hope that it will prove to be a benefit to my husband and kids, and future kids, so that they can learn to love books, and learn that the books and the references are there when they need them. I'm so excited!