That Spring Post

We've been doing this long enough that every loyal reader probably knows what's coming - that post where I go on and on about what we've been doing outdoors to improve our yard and garden. It's that time of year. As spring arrives, so do our big plans and dreams to give our house great curb appeal or create a backyard that's inviting and fun (and then the sun gets hot and the bugs come out and I retreat inside and never get to enjoy it). We've been doing so many of these that I won't even link back to them all. Peruse March, April, and May for every year we've been doing this, and you'll find them.

And so, it begins. First, as a reminder of how much we've done in just a couple of week, this was the first day of spring:

 The blooming trees were quite surprised:

But two weeks later when the weather finally warmed up to about 45 during the day, we got to work. We went to Home Depot to stock up on mulch and, as always happens, came home with a few extra items. Some lavender and rosemary, a tomato plant (we've been starting basil from seeds in our window but weren't planning to do vegetables until we remembered that basil and tomatoes love to grow together)

We also bought some full sun colorful flowers to add to the front garden that we were planning to redo. We got Lithadora and Salvia, which were both very on sale and therefore very tempting:

However, that meant the clock was ticking to rearrange the garden and get these guys in the ground. Our front largest garden bed had been designed so that we surrounded our big oak with flowering ground cover. So it never looked good after we had to remove the giant oak tree. For the first year (when we were told we should not plant anything permanent there to allow the pest that killed our tree to subside), we planted a depressingly small amount of annuals that didn't last the summer. Then last fall when we tried to plant our crepe myrtle there, we found out that the hollowed-out stump area was still too woody to give us the room to plant a tree, forming a solid floor of trunk about a foot below the surface.

Then D had a genius idea last week, after I complained about it for the umpteenth time and debated whether we should pay someone to dig/carve it out. He moved it a couple of feet closer to our lamppost and moved a hydrangea that was crowded in a different garden bed into the shallower hole where the old tree had been. This let us move the crepe myrtle away from being directly under power lines AND allowed us to shrink the garden bed more in line with the more modest plants we have there now that the oak tree is gone.

We planted the Salvia and Lithadora all around the hydrangea and crepe myrtle. It was a family affair.

 Then D uprooted the plastic garden divider and moved it to make the garden smaller.

You can see better in this picture the old bed area and the new one. Obviously we need to turn the soil on the area that used to be garden, uproot any Georgia Blue ground cover worth saving, and then level the ground off and start trying to grow grass.

We just had 4 cubic yards of compost delivered. We better get to work.