Last year was a big year of changes and I've been trying to adapt ever since. This long holiday weekend I continued on our efforts to get the garden back in order. Tiny steps you know.
 |
| before |
From a distance it was still somewhat passable, but eventually I could no longer deny that the front yard needed some serious help. The white picket fence I'd once loved was in need of a good coat of paint, which I considered until finding out the wood was mostly rotten. And the purple barberry bushed were overgrown and dying. Not to mention their copious thorns which stuck me every time I tried to garden around them, no matter how thick my gloves or careful I was.
So early this spring the boyfriend pulled out the bushes with his truck (I guess there's a redneck side to all of us, but it was fast and it worked) and pulled out the fence. We loaded up the bushes in his truck and after a stressful drive where I fretted about us losing our precariously balanced load all over the road, we made it to the compost site and got rid of those suckers.
Then I weeded and weeded, and planned and shopped for something to replace the bushes with. The boyfriend campaigned for flowers only (no more pesky overgrown bush issues with those), while I thought we needed something bigger to fill the large gaps.
Thursday evening I went to the garden center and spent a lovely evening picking out two dwarf butterfly bushes, a baptisa smoke, three Veronica speedwell plants, lavender and an obedient plant. Then on Friday and Saturday I weeded some more, amended the soil, moved plants, planted new ones and mulched.
 |
| after |
My body still aches from the effort, but finally it's finished and I'm pretty pleased with the result.
