Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!!!! I thought a flower appropriate for today :) In the Fall of 2006 Courtney and I went to the North Georgia Mountain Festival in Hiawassee, GA and froze to death. But between cups of hot cider and kettle corn we dropped into a flower competition that was held as part of the festival. There were several examples there of beautiful dahlias and I fell in love with them. The roses I had been growing in California don't grow so well out here so I was looking for a new type of flower. It turns out that dahlias love Georgia weather so I asked Santa for some for Christmas and she (Santa's elf, my mom) ordered several for me from Jackson Perkins. As many of my gardening projects go, this turned into a much bigger task than expected—I needed a place to plant my new bulb so I took out about ~70 square feet of grass in my front yard (and had to go down about 1.5 feet!) to create a pear shaped flower bed for my new flowers. The bed looks great and the dahlias came up in spades (sorry, couldn't resist) and look great around the new bird feeder I placed in the bed. The picture above came from the dahlias this past spring. It is a bit hard to tell from the picture, but the bloom is about 10 inches across—Dahlias really do like Georgia weather!