Household Happiness: Garden Bouquets

Usually, the 15th of each month features a post that I call household happiness.  It's something in my home that I really love.  Last week on the 15th I was yammering on about politics and so I missed my regular  household happiness posting.  But this is my blog and I make the rules, so I've decided that a delayed  household happiness posting is just the ticket to start out the week.  The pictures you see are various flower bouquets that I cut from my garden over the course of the past summer.
The very first garden I planted, on my apartment balcony when I lived in Nashville,  featured a few tomato plants and several pots of flowers.  Each week, I would cut some of those flowers for an indoor bouquet.  Almost 20 years later, my garden is a lot larger but it still includes flowers.  I continue to cut bouquets for the indoors.

One of the parts of summer I enjoy the most is picking flowers for fresh  bouquets each week.  I plant scads of zinnias of all sorts; they are old-fashioned, hearty, colorful flowers which makes for a bouquet that can stand up to rigor of cat attacks.  I plant lots of other flowers as well: marigolds (they are natural pest protection for the garden), cosmos, gladiolas, dahlias, and lilies make regular appearances in the flower beds at my house.

But the zinnias are always my favorites.; their appearance in my home is a sure sign that summer's garden bounty has arrived.  As the cold weather arrives, I will pour over seed catalogs picking out the zinnia varieties that will see me through the next summer.

The seed packets will arrive by December and I'll tuck them into my kitchen cupboard, right next to the vases I use for flowers.  There they will serve as a welcome reminder that spring and summer flowers are just around the corner.

Note: For the past month, I have been experimenting with a new host site for this blog.  It's a long and boring story, but the upshot is that I'm not finding Blogger a great host for photo uploads.  So there is another Sassafras Mama underway, over at Wordpress.com.  You can find it here.  It's been up for a few weeks, featuring the same posts that you can find here at the Blogger site but with easier (and better photos).  If you're inclined, please pop on over.  Right now it's still an experiment to see which format I like best.  If you have an opinion, please let me know.

And thanks for reading.