Monday harvest - complete with two rat-chewed eggplants:

Of course you realize, this means war! The trap has been set & there will be blood:

Hugelkultur container - the first layer is a Christmas tree I collected last year:

Added the first touch of native soil & decayed leaf litter:

I’m a big fan of everything Aysarth made and shared over the years. And as you’ve probably noticed, I just love plants and gardens AND replacements so I couldn’t ignore their wonderful Garden Plant Gussy Up mod. But since I started making cc for Sims, I wanted to apply everything I’ve learned to make this replacement even more beautiful.

So, with permission from Aysarth I’m sharing my edits 😋

Again, all credit for this replacement goes to Aysarth, I just made some cosmetic changes to the tremendous and incredible work they've done.

What I did:

- replaced almost all plants’ textures and adjusted mapping;

- replaced ground “hill” fertilized and unfertilized texture with the same Maxis one but of higher detail;

- deleted weeds texture inside all packages as it was redundant;

- fixed meshes on some plants that contained invisible Maxis poles;

- fixed and retextured pole bean pole, now it’s the same in all plant stages, doesn’t move around with each new stage and has no gap on the upper part in grown state;

- fixed pole bean plant alignement in all states so that it looked more like the same plant but growing.

I HIGHLY recommend using this mod by @lamare-sims​ alongside this replacement to block the clicking option on the ground outside the plant itself.

If you were already using Aysarth's original plants you'll have to delete them before using mine. Also please read the description on the original mod's page if you've never used it before as it contains important info.

Just like in Aysarth’s mod, all plants are separated so you can choose which ones you’d like to have replaced (but I recommend keeping all of them for coherency 😉).

Compressed, clearly labelled, picture included.

I planted a climbing pole bean to the biggest pot in the balcony, because I wanted it to climb the fence and to create a nice plant wall of green leaves and beans. And it's working! Last year, the summer heat hindered it a bit, so it started wilting before it could cover the entire fence, but this year I planted it early, kept it inside in a little pot, and now it's already making flowers! I'm looking forward to seeing how wide it will go.

Friday's harvest:

The view from the seating area in the backyard garden:

Looks to the left:

Look to the right:

Our corn is starting to tassel:

Just a house sparrow taking a bath:

A running water feature is the second best thing you can put of to attract birds to your yard:

Saturday's harvest:

Adventures in dog walking - blurry bat photo edition. I think this is my best photo of a bat yet. Based solely on what bats are most common in our area, it is probably a Little Brown or a Tricolored bat (aka an Eastern Pipistrelle as they were formerly called... I still call them that because it is the common name I learned growing up & because I just enjoy saying "pipistrelle"):

Today’s backyard garden harvest... sometimes it’s like this: 

What can I say but “gray squirrels”: 

Dinner... those are our squash, purple hull peas & pole beans: 

No matter your age, if you go walking, see a cool rock & don’t put it in your pocket, can you really call what you’re doing “living”: 

Echinacea ... I can’t remember the cultivar but it’s brilliant: 

Burgundy okra. The okra in the backyard garden has struggled this year. Of four plants, we only have two that survived. Between the abnormal high amounts of rain and the relatively mild temperatures (for Memphis), it isn’t surprising. Okra came from Africa and they seem to prefer high heat with only moderate rainfall:  

The little bugger flew right as I took the shot. I still think it looks cool: 

Can’t tell what that is in our Clemson okra blossom? Well, it is two bees fighting over who would pollinate it: 

Grasshopper on our pole beans. The pole beans are looking pretty tired due to a spider mite infestation: 

The Red Menace was blocking my way in through the backdoor: 

The Red Menace may look sweet but he is a butcher with three confirmed kills - one baby Robin, one adult Mourning Dove and one Brown Rat: 

This is the Dewit hand trowel that my wife bought. Dewit tools are made in Holland and they aren’t cheap but only dwarves of Durin’s line forge better tools: 

This was our first time trying this Cabernet Sauvignon. It was good but it has coffee and vanilla notes that make it more of a Fall or Winter wine for me: