Earlier this summer, I insisted on planting a salad garden. Good idea in theory. Kevin helped me, it got planted, it grew, we ate salads. Then I lost interest and didn't keep up with the weeds and we ended up with the Black Forest of Death Garden, Part 2. (The unkempt, flowerless flower garden was the BFoDG, Part 2.)
Thus it came to pass, Kevin made a comment about the sorry state of the salad garden, and it was clear he expected me to do something about it. :::sigh::: So, last weekend, this is what I did...
I cleared it all out. In a bold move, I took the hedge clippers to the chard and just cut it off, since Kevin said it would grow back (and it has started to regenerate already!). I picked the last of the onions that were hiding among the weeds...
...accidentally got a few carrots, too. Aren't they the scrawniest things?? And then there is this one renegade Easter Lily that I'd forgotten was in the bed we used for the salad garden, and it miraculously survived the rototiller, came up right on the edge of the bed and the grass, and has all of these beautiful blooms on it! (We won't bother telling it that it is a few months late.)
The whole family ended up getting in on the act, which always helps motivate me...
And so the yard and the salad garden side of live looked much cleaner and far less scarier than it had been looking.
Then, in a weird twist of fate this week, I found myself with the urge to clean up the flower bed on the other side of the front of the house (a.k.a. the BFoDG, Part 2). I used to do up our flower beds every year...mulch, annuals...and by this time of year, they looked gorgeous with big, full plants. A few years ago, though, I lost the will to go to that trouble and started buying perennials instead. I love perennial gardens some of my friends have, and the lack of having to plant things every year seemed like a great idea. I had no clue that these things still would need major attention, to be separated and moved around and such. Not to mention, the perennials I bought? They were ugly. Big, green fuzzy things that took over. I largely ignored them for two years. This year, however, I dug them all out and pitched them down in the woods. Nothing in the flower beds was better than those things.
But now it was July, and I had exactly that...nothing in the front looking pretty. My only accomplishment from the perennial experiment was the day lilies thriving on the driveway side of the flowerbed...
I love orange day lilies.
I have no idea what each of them is called, though I know the little yellow ones (that were not blooming when I was taking pictures) are called Stella D'Oros, like the cookies.
I especially love this variety, as it reminds me of the ones that grow along the roadsides and, when I was a kid, my dad would stop and cut some and bring them home for my mom. I loved when he brought those lilies home. It's such a great memory.
Anyway, the gardening bug bit last week, and I know to jump on it when it does that, and so I did...I went and bought a truckload of mulch (because mulch makes everything look prettier)...
(And I totally think it is funny that the first three letters of the truck's licence plate are "YCK"...if you could see how beat up the truck is, you'd understand how "yuck" seems appropriate, though it is one heck of a reliable old truck for things like this.)And then I went to Lowe's and bought pretty perennials...
And then I decided to rip out bushes. Seriously. We had two azaleas that had seen better days, and a small, scrawny green bush that was misshapen, all at the corner of the house. We've talked about getting rid of them, so I hooked up a chain to the tractor, had the kids wrap it around the bottom of the first bush, and yanked that sucker out. Moved on to bush #2...and it would not come out for anything. Long story short (too late!), I called Kevin and he told me to just leave it and he'd do it when he got home...which is his way of saying, "Oh my god please do not demolish anything else!!!" (I've already ripped out walls in the house while he's been gone...my bursts of motivation can sometimes be scary.)So, he came home, tore out the last two bushes, and then we had the great idea to move a sizable rhododendron from the driveway side of the house up to that now empty corner, as the driveway side doesn't get enough light and the poor thing never does well. So, how else does one move a big bush?
With a tractor, of course. (How do people garden who don't own machinery like this?? LOL)
Getting it lined up...
...voila! One rhododendron moved about 15 feet to a new home. It is currently encroaching on one of the remaining bushes further to the right, but after it takes root again and begins to grow, Kevin will trim it and it will be fine. Hopefully. Or we'll end up with a big, dead rhododendron and have a huge empty space in the flower bed to fill...like this one...
(What it looked like pre-rhodo move. Those hostas sitting to the right then got moved down to the spot where the rhodo had been. I seriously dislike hostas. Not sure why.)Good thing about waiting until night to do this was that everyone pitched in and helped with the planting and mulching, thus what would have taken me the better part of a day only took us a couple of hours. And now we have a happy flower bed...
Nigel the gnome is happy to be able to see daylight again...
And doesn't the mulch look pretty???I was too lazy to change my lens from the 50 mm, so I don't have any full shots of the entire bed. Will take one of those sometime soon. Suffice it to say, it looks a little empty right now, but given time, these perennials should fill in nicely. Kevin is convinced I put too many in for the space they're supposed to take up, but I really like the "full" look, as long as the fullness is coming from pretty things, not weeds. And if it gets too full, we can always move them. Heh. ;)
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