Exhaustion and Desperation

Thatching and dropping seed didn't really do much, so it's time to bring out the big guns. We spent Sunday raking little rows into the ground and putting Scotts Patch Kit everywhere we could. We also looked into getting our soil tested, but it's been way to wet to go out there and dig up some samples. It's on our to-do list, though. We're thinking of sending off three unique samples: front lawn, back lawn, and front flower beds.

Every weekend (at least for now while it's not scorchingly hot with man-eating mosquitos) we've been trying to get out and coax our lawn and garden back to life. Obviously our hard work and desperation seeped through into real life and my parents are taking pity on us and coming to help us this weekend.

Knowing when to quit, we decided that despite the fact that we want to plant edible things, this year we're going to stick to planting them in pots, that way they will take less weeding and care and we won't have to build a garden that would probably just fail anyway.

So here we have basil and cilantro (in theory, one day):

Parsley and cilantro in these little guys (which will live inside on our window once they germinate; for now they live in our upstairs hallway in the warmth and darkness):

(We're growing a lot of parsley and cilantro because they are last year's stock and were stored pretty improperly, so if any germinate at all, it will be a small miracle.)

We're also starting some 2011 seeds: cherry tomatoes and scallions (and more basil) to transplant into large outdoor pots (thank you, Costco).

Even if none of these grow, we won't be out too much money or effort, at least.

Finally, a couple of questions to anyone who might know flowers. I've been operating under the assumption for two springs now that these plants are roses. I've been researching how to deadhead and prune them and what to feed them. I'm only finally coming around to the fact that they are probably not roses at all. Now I realize that there are a lot of kinds of roses. But these don't smell like roses, they don't have thorns, they have barky stems all the way up to the flower, and they bud in twos and threes.

So what the heck are they?

Flower identification question number two: these are everywhere and look a little like dogwood but I'm pretty sure they aren't (dogwoods have clumpy little pistils in the center, don't they?). So what's your guess:

While we slave outside to make the yard look nice, these guys loll about on the window and watch. On a recent vacation, we saw a ceramic "beware of cats" sign that looked custom made for our babies, so we couldn't resist. Don't they look like critters you need to beware of?