Walk Around the Yard!

Yesterday afternoon Dear Hubby and I took a little walk around the yard to see what's popping up as far as flowers.  We just recently moved into the house that my husband grew up in, so everything around the place is new to me.  Here are a few pics that I took, unfortunately I don't know the names of too many of the plants or trees, so if anyone knows what they are I would greatly appreciate some help on some names.

 

 This is a bush about 6 ft tall and around, with these pretty yellow flowers.  All that Don could tell me was that it was one of the many Mother's Day gifts from over the years. 














This next tree is about 20-30 ft tall with these big white flowers.  The flowers are about the size of my palm.  I was thinking maybe a Magnolia??? or a Flowering Crab???  but I am really unsure.

These cute little blue flowers are only about 6 inches tall.  I know I have seen them in my flower catalogs, but the names escape me.

 This is another unknown for me, I'm thinking it is probably in the lily family but there are no buds yet to help me determine what it might be.

I love my big burly Maple tree in the back yard.  I don't know if it's the character in the bark or the big burls that I love more.  Now it has the little leaves popping out of the bark and it makes it look like vines crawling up the sides from across the yard.

I found this cute little bird's nest left over from last year.

I even found a couple spears of asparagus popping up already in the garden (that hasn't been cleaned out yet)  Coming from Northern Wisconsin, we usually don't tackle the gardens until at least June, so I'm not use to looking for asparagus in the middle of April.

We took a little walk down to the creek and saw a few raccoon tracks in the sand.

The coon have been paying visits on a regular basis.  They have found my bird feeder a few times already and last night I noticed the neighbor's motion light kept coming on then off then on again, so I got up to investigate.  There were 2 pretty decent sized coon playing on the neighbor's patio, Don finally opened the door and yelled at them and they took off down the alley.

We noticed the other day that there was a hole under the corner of the barn where we store the lawn mowers, so we did a little investigating.

Don had opened the door and we heard a hiss and a growl and something clunking around inside.  The insulation was all tore up and ripped down.  Upon further investigation we realized the squirrels were the culprits of all the damage.  I really hope they don't have a nest of little ones in there, I guess we have some cleaning up to do!!!  Just outside the building are a bunch of left overs from their winter feasts of our black walnuts.

Between the coon and the squirrels I think Dear Hubby and I are going to have to go on varmint patrol.  I hope you enjoyed our little walk around the yard.  Again, if anyone knows the names of any of my plants, trees or bushes, I would appreciate the help.

Until next time ...
Sara