Engage the Weekend : Hitting Up the Flower Market

Hello #engagetheweekend community, this past weekend’s adventure included a ) cheeky monkey and b) family flower shopping. Not as exciting as looking for the Holmen Mothman, but it was fun (and don’t worry, we’ll get to the Mothman someday, I promise!). Besides, who needs a Mothman when you have a bouldering monkey in te family??

With most of the weekend spent dodging thunderstorms and humid, hot weather, we decided to get into the car, drive across the Mississippi River, and do some flower shopping for the backyard. We try to spruce up the backyard with a few flower pots, flowers, and dirt; they always look good until another thunderstorm blows through and knocks everything over…but what do I know? I’m just go with the flow; Hattie and Liza do a much better picking out flowers than me, anyway.

The shop is a family run, open concept market that specializes in all things outdoors. I like to go there when I need to buy straw for covering up grass seeds, and buy the occasional caramel apple to split with Hattie. The market is located in the Apple Capital of Minnesota…so yeah, those caramel covered apples are pretty good. They also have quite a few flowers ready to go each spring. As usual, for better or worse, we do try to support the local businesses when we can.

The cheeky monkey that joined us on this adventure was our daughter; needing a costume to go flower shopping, she opted for the monkey tail and monkey ears combination that she wore so effectively for COVID Halloween last year. As you can imagine, everyone loved the ears in the apple capital.

I’m not very good at remembering flowers by name, aside from marigolds, but I do love the colors of May. Although, to be honest, it's always a bit of a flower overload at places like this for me. Here were a few images I was able to capture while the gang was shopping:

At the end of the shopping trip, we ended up with a cartful of flowers and one little hedgehog. We also picked up some onion bulbs to plant as well; this is the first time we’ve planted onions, so that should be interesting.

We spent all day Saturday transplanting the flowers to pots, filling the pots with good dirt, and then setting them up in our backyard. After more thunderstorms for most of the day yesterday, I snuck out early this morning to get a few photos of the final product, post rainfall.

The flowers attempting to cover up the badly needed paint job on the back steps:

The little hedgehog and marigold combination in charge of keeping rabbits away from our garden was doing well:

Newly planted veggies in our garden ready for some sun:

And of course my most favorite flower in the backyard; again, I couldn’t tell you what it’s called, but I think it looks very lovely set up in Hattie’s new playhouse. I’m looking forward to watering it tonight after work with her; it's an adventure in and of itself.

I know, not as exciting as past adventures, but our backyard is a chore in and of itself. I will say, the beer does taste exceptionally good too, after all that work. Cryptos were nerve wracking for me this weekend (well, to some extent anyway…I’ve been in this space for a very long time), but have to say working on the backyard puts some things in perspective. Now, if I could just retire off of Bitcoin and work on it full time…ahh…the dream, yes.

Hoping everyone survived the big dip too and had a wonderful weekend as well! Hopefully you too planted some flowers, enjoyed the weather (if possible), and are getting ready for summer (or winter...wherever you might be). Let me know what you planted too! Until next weekend, have a great week everyone.