I planted some verbena plants in my front flowerbed right under my bedroom window.  They would have looked great in between the orange geraniums as they were a really pretty coral color.  Notice I keep mentioning them in the past tense.  They were attacked by snails!  I noticed some shiny residue on what was left of them and figured it was snails.  I went out with a flashlight late last night and found about 20 snails feasting away.  I pulled them off and smashed them, but have a feeling more will be back tonight.  So I’m going to pull away the plants up against the house and try to de-snail the area.  Then I’ll be picking up some beer and putting out dishes of it since this seems to be a natural way of killing them.  Hopefully the cats won’t drink it.

I then found slugs in one of the flowerbeds in the backyard, eating away at a couple of plants.  They too were smashed, but that was a lot messier than picking up the snails–yukky!  For slugs, I’ve read that the remedy is to dump salt on them.  This means that I’ll have to check for them nightly, but eventually I hope they will quit propagating and I won’t be running around the backyard late at night with a salt shaker!

And now for the good part–jasmine!  While I was out back last night a familiar scent hit my nostrils–the night-blooming jasmine is beginning to bloom!  The family room door will be wide open tonight so that the house will fill with that wonderful scent.  I sooo love this plant!

Today I went to the local farmer’s market and found a new kind of jasmine.  It smells really sweet and the white flowers are very full and fluffy.  I have a spot in the backyard where one of the roses I transplanted last year didn’t make it and I intended to put in another rose.  Instead I bought the new jasmine bush and will be putting it in.  I think this flowerbed should look great with the jasmine at one end and a hydrangea at the other end and three rosebushes in between with a few white dusty miller plants in the background.

I got some tomatoes at the local nursery where they had a buy one, get one free sale.  Got two yellow tomato plants and two large red ones.  Also picked up some plants to fill in the area where the snails destroyed the ones out front.

So now it’s time to get busy and get all this stuff in the ground!