I discovered the magic of seed starting kits (72 cell trays/dome/heatmat) and went a bit crazy starting seeds indoors this winter. Lots of coneflowers: cheyene spirit, sunset, firebird, sandy yellow, wild berry pow wow and a whole bunch of other stuff like scarlet sage, bergamot, various butterfly weeds, red lychnis, statice, sweet marjoram, red drummond phlox, hollyhock charters double mix, ne aster, red & white yarrow, mexican torch sunflower, a whole bunch of different zinnias and more, plus herbs for the butterflies like rue, fennel, parsley, etc.
I'm a big diy'er when it comes to home improvement, granted I couldn't afford to have professional help with my house in the first place so if anything is getting done its diy, but I take alot of pride in fixing up my house and I know its getting done properly, usually over-done! But back to plants, I take that same sort of pride with plants as I do with my house, its very rewarding to start from seed and see them grow and blossom and have butterflies enjoying them. I garden for butterflies and hummingbirds. So heres some of my seedlings, wintersown containers, garden areas, etc...
This is my "project property" or "future house" that I bought a few years ago to fix up and eventually live in with my family, hope to move in this fall, working on ulilities now, the back half addition also needs siding which i'll probably finish once we're living in it, hard to pay rent at another house and have extra money to put into this house. So when I get sick of working inside or I have no money for what I need to do inside, I do some gardening/landscaping, heres a shot of the house as well....
in the top right corner is Sundance Bicolor Gaillardia, a very cool looking flower imo
Hollyhocks
A new bed to help accommodate some of my new seedlings, ya things look pretty sad still here in CT, a few plants are starting to pop up but not much quite yet...I also used some crappy free mulch from my local dump for most of the gardens, once we're living here I will replace with good stuff, I know there's some eye sores around the property, my goal has just been to get some plants established so we have a fuller looking garden once we're full time residents!
seed grown dahlias from saved seeds (got the seeds from a gardener with a huge dahlia bed, I took home a plastic grocery bag full of seed heads two years ago.) I like the suspense and surprise of seeing what types & colors of flowers i'm given, I will have two beds of 20 plants each for these then others scattered around the property, I think I have around 50 dahlia seedlings at the moment
