Shh! It's A Surprise for Cheesehead

I told you all that we were working on a landscaping project yesterday. I thought I'd share what we did together and what I will surprise him with. This was once the area where the poor deer eaten arborvitae used to live. I'll do a before and after post when I can find the before pictures. I guess I should have done a better job of managing my pictures....

Cheeshead trimmed back all of the tall weeds with the weed trimmer, I pulled them out by hand for placement in the compost pile. If there were some weed roots I couldn't get out, I hoed the ground until I could get the roots as well as the plant. It took a lot of time, but the results will be well worth the effort.

To frame out the shape of our garden, we laid a hose out in the shape we wanted it in. It took a few tries to find one that we liked, but we finally found a shape that we both liked.



Once we did that, we just had to dig the trenches and install the edging. We dug our trenches almost as deep as the edging is tall. We left a coupe of inches clearance between the edging and the dirt so we would have room for mulch. Edging is much easier to work with when you flatten the curves out prior to your project. I laid it out flat and weighed it down with rocks. We only got the edging in and then it started to rain. Grr. At least we got it all installed before the rain started.



We had to call it quits for the day since after it rained the ground was wet and we didn't want to play in the mud.

We weren't going to plant any extra plants in the garden this year since we have no money to buy more, but Cheesehead mentioned that he didn't care for the rock garden in the back yard. The rock garden was really overgrown, there were so many weeds in there you could hardly tell the plants from the weeds. I guess weed control got pushed down the priority list this summer. OOPS!

Happily that gave us a some plants to move to the new garden areas, so it wasn't a complete loss. I placed the three big peonies, lavendar, sage, hygrangea, yarrow, and creeping phlox by the shed. The day lilies, starfighter lily, 2 small peonies, and sedum were placed up front. There was still more room after those plants were transplanted, I divided the ones that I knew wouldn't suffer from the divisions and spread them all out. With no money in my landscaping budget I decided to get a bit creative.



The containers are looking a bit leggy and Cheesehead was ready to get rid of all of them yesterday. Luckily it rained so he had to wait to throw them in the compost pile. I took all of our containers that weren't doing very well and carefully dug the root balls out of them and placed them into holes I dug in the ground. There, the garden is full. I'll have to replace the annuals in the spring but I hope to have a bit of money by then.

Cheesehead wanted to use our landscaping fabric, but I hate that stuff. He tried to insist that we should use it to prevent too many weeds from growing even though I told him the reasons we should skip using it. Gee, too bad he wasn't here to do the work today. I hope he isn't too annoyed that I skipped the fabric and just went straight for the mulch. Hey, at least it's work that he didn't have to do!



Apparently the mouse that had made it's home in the grill cover this spring has migrated to the pile of extra mulch we've got sitting outside. I found it today when I took 5 bags of mulch to cover the newly planted and edged area by the driveway. Who knew such a small creature could startle a person quite so much?



To finish off along the driveway I recycled some of the rocks from the back garden to help keep the mulch in place. What do you think?

Thank you for stopping by. Please leave me a message and a backlink. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cindy