Garden Remodel

First of all, let me just say that Olympia is a huge helper. And by helping I mean sitting far away from the garden and eating grape tomatoes butt naked.

Here is the giant delivery of compost! It was embarassing how excited I was to have 3 cubic yards of dirt dumped in the driveway. I was trying to hide my giddiness but the delivery guy saw right through it. What a nerd I am.

Here is the veggie garden BEFORE, well, actually about 1/10th of the way through. It was a big bed of Pachysandra which is a great ground cover because it spreads like wildfire and never, ever has to be tended to.

This was completely back-breaking and took us two full days. Totally horrendous. I neglected to put the Chiropractor bills into the garden budget, lesson learned.

The cool (heinous) thing about Pachysandra is that you can very easily grow it with just pieces of other plants. I'm sad to say that this is the cleanest we could get the bed:

If we lived here for 20 more years I would still be weeding those things from my veggie space. The silver lining? I listed the HUGE pile of pulled out Pachysandra on FreeCycle and 12 people showed up to gleefully stuff it into garbage bags and take it home to plant. One persons invasive weed is anothers expensive landscaping plant. Next time I want to rid a space of Pachysandra, (which might be next spring if this stuff grows back all winter) is list the stuff on FreeCycle and have THEM pull it out. Another lesson learned. It did make our sore backs feel ever so much better to see people smile over our hard work.

The blue tarp and the red garbage can are still full of compost:

(The fence is for squirrels and the neighbor's cats. I keep telling those cats that they're welcome to come take a nap with me in my bed! But if they poop in my veggie garden we're buying a BB gun.)

I realize that I have to sprinkle in Oly pictures to keep you all interested:

Here are peas and a tomato:

Red and green Butterhead lettuce that I planted in a grid so hopefully it will be a beautiful checkerboard before we devour it:

Herbs in pots:

And now onto the flower bed! The front corner of the yard has an established bed, and along the sidewalk next to the house there's ivy and an Azalea, so we just tilled the grass along the driveway and made on huge bed! That's the red roto-tiller that helped us:

We found tons of these beautiful stones on the other side of the house and used them to frame the whole bed:

Here's the finished product!

(this is an older picture before we put stones along the driveway side):

Here are some Cosmos that I started under our light cart in the basement in February:

Here's a Columbine that was so happy when I put it in the ground that it shot up and bloomed in a week:

I poached some Solomon's Seal and Ferns from other places on the property and thankfully they're happy about the move:

Last year we pruned the heck out of this Azalea and it's thanking us for saving it's life with big gorgeous, lush blooms:

Thank you Everyone for indulging me, and we'll now return you to your regularly scheduled Oly programming shortly....