Love it,hope you get a cup and saucer up there with it,that would look so good :) Did you make the bench from a chair or a headboard? I really like it a lot! Everything looks great :)

I asked my DH this morning...how much time I HAVE to spend to keep the weeds under control versus how much time I LOVE to spend in the garden! LOL He thinks I spend about 1 hour a week doing "serious" weeding. Both of us stroll the garden every morning and evening. We both tend to pull weeds here and there as we stroll along. DH hates weeds even more than I do, so he's vigilant about weeds along any paths. He can't always tell what's a weed or a plant, so I go into the garden. In early spring when the weeds start coming out, I have to spend several hours in one attempt...especially if it has rained a lot, or if we go away for a few days. We brought in garden soil and didn't till up the ground beneath it (since it was scraped during house construction). We have around 6-8 inches of clean garden soil, then we have 4 inches of mulch. The last time we mulched was a year ago. The mulch is breaking down nicely. I think the combination of clean soil and and mulch has prevented a lot of weed growth. We also installed a deep edging cut in the ground with composite edging, backfilled with gravel along the top edges of the outer garden. This helps keep the crabgrass from sneaking in from the meadow. There is landscape fabric underneath the stone in the dry streambed. I hate the stuff in a garden, but it makes it very easy to pull out weeds that seeded among the stone. The worst area for weeds is the gravel path! Spurge is a real problem there. I use my trowel to scrape up under the weeds to get the shallow roots out, then I rake the gravel back. It's 100 degrees here today. Is forecast to be 102 tomorrow. We get up at 6:30am to get our outside exercise and chores done before 9:00am. My DH retired on June 2nd, so now there are two of us in the garden! He's asking me to identify the butterflies and has started talking to the birds, too! :-)

Gldno, great photo; what kind of camera are you using? Count me in as another birdwatcher/birdfeeder, though like Mimi, I don't set the table year round. At Thanksgiving I start putting out black oil sunflower seeds in several tube feeders and will also hang suet or tallow if it's really cold. I take them up by St Patrick's. We have many mature trees and several shrubs around the house as well as a number of boxes and birdhouses and I've noticed that fighting over the feeders interferes with nest building. So, I'm happy to help out in the winter, but once it's spring, they're on their own. I only feed BOSS; the Finches like it as well as the considerably more expensive Thistle, and I figure if the birds are just hankering for corn, they can (and do) flit down among the chickens for a little scratch. Our Grandson usually makes a couple of peanut butter pine cone bird feeders each year for Christmas too. Have you done Cornell's Great Backyard Bird Count? It's a four day, nationwide event that consists of individuals simply looking out their window and counting how many birds (and what species) are hanging around. You don't have to count from your home; anywhere you see birds is good. You can spend as little as 15 minutes on one afternoon, or several hours each day if you have the time. You fill in a different report for each day which is why there are two reports for Bowlegs, although I was the only person participating. I'd like to change that this year, and get the local school science class or at least the 4H group involved. We live on a farm with a good pond, surrounded by open fields and woods that sits at least a half mile from the nearest house, so we have a nice diversity of native birds all winter, everything from Roadrunner and Turkey Vultures to Juncos and Goldfinch. When you add in all the domestic chickens underfoot, it's pretty lively out there. :^) Here is a link that might be useful: Great Backyard Bird Count FAQ

It may be intended to be a butterfly "house". The little I have read about butterfly houses indicates that they don't work very well, though. https://www.pinterest.com/explore/butterfly-house/?lp=true