Tuesdays With Tracy Refreshing My Home & Garden for Summer

Hello Friends!

I am Kelly’s Mom, Tracy, joining you on The Tattered Pew for my monthly visit and today is about Refreshing my Home & Garden for Summer. I hope the weather is good in your neck of the woods. It has been a cool May but as we head toward June it is warming up nicely.

We have had some new visitors on the pond this month.

Refreshing my Home

Let’s start with some small changes to my home to bring a touch of summer refreshment inside.

I have mentioned before how I sometimes change out my decor seasonally. To make it easy I put plastic wrap on some items and store them on a shelf in the basement. This is a bowl full of a collection of Japanese fishing floats that I unwrapped and brought out for summer.

Most of the fishing floats were inherited from my great Aunt Dee Dee. She lived on Wake Island in the South Pacific back in the 1960’s. She brought them with her when she moved back to the mainland. The bowl was from Homegoods and the table runner is an antique grain sack I picked up at a vintage market.

Currently on my coffee table…

A white tray with a candle, a bowl of collected seashells, and a stack of books topped with faux peonies.

I love to bring out seashells for summer decor. This vintage bowl is full of collected shells.

And below is a rattan box full of collected seashells. It is sitting on a table I painted which sits next to our stairs. I picked up the old faded quilt at a flea market.

But, let’s go back to that coffee table tray. Doesn’t it look so much better with real peonies?! Three of my seven bushes in the back garden are in bloom.

Can you picture my happy dancing? Ha!

The candle in the glass hurricane is a favorite of mine, it has a wonderful fresh citrus smell. And, I love those two books, London in Bloom & Paris in Bloom. They have come in handy as I’ve been studying them to look for gardens in London & Paris on our trip this summer.

Shop My Home

Refreshing my Garden for Summer

Let’s go outside to see what’s new in the garden. Have you joined Kelly’s Lazy Girls Garden Club?

I’m all in! For Mother’s Day I was so excited to receive a raised garden bed from my family. Below you can see Kelly and Larry putting it together.

When it was put together, we lined it with landscape fabric and lots of cardboard boxes I had been saving. Then filled it with bags of dirt and garden soil.

The day after Mother’s Day I planted Zinnia seeds and added a soaker hose on a timer. Below are the Zinnia seedlings two weeks after being planted.

So I have to patiently wait for those Zinnias! In the meantime, I am loving the current blooms in the garden.

I’m loving the Viburnum bush. I cut lots of these and we used them for my grandson’s garden wedding luncheon.

So this happened the other day just before the Peonies popped open…

It is pretty common to have hail storms in Colorado and it can destroy plants but this was a small one and our garden survived.

And then the Peonies popped open! Yay!

“If you look the right way you can see the whole world is a garden.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett

Kelly’s stepson, Easton and his sweet bride Katy, were married last week. They decided to have a small ceremony with family, and a lunch in Kelly & Mike’s backyard. Both Kelly, and Easton’s mom, Lindsay, created a most magical garden party for the luncheon. Katy purchased colorful, pretty blooms from a florist and those were gathered with flowers from Kelly’s garden, and some borrowed bridal lace blossoms from Kelly’s sweet neighbor.