The (mis)Adventures of a SFH: How does your garden grow?

My garden is growing fine. Part of my Memorial Day weekend warrior blitz was gardening. I started at nothing. Especially after I yanked those bushes out of the front space, I really had nothing but a patch of dirt. Let the blitz begin!

What I started with - so lonely and sad

I convinced my mom to take a trip to Home Depot with me on Sunday morning for my major plant purchase. Luckily for me, one of my brothers friends was working and I found him right away to help me. Well, it was luckily for me, not so luckily for him. There was a lot of heavy lifting to be done. $260 later, Iwas the owner of several snowflake viburnum bushes, astilbes, bricks for edging, dirt, gardening tools, weed kill for that pesky creeping charlie, solar garden lights and several flats of annuals.

For the life of me, I always have trouble remembering the names of these things...marigolds! and...Dusty Miller! I can never remember it...but it always makes me think of whisky.

The hard part of this venture was clearing the dirt of all the grass, trees, bushes, etc. There was a lot of tree seedlings from the maple tree that had started growing. I pulled out all I could by hand, but wound up having to get my dad over with some extra tools to take care of the remaining stumps.

Look at those pesky stumps!

Once everything was cleaned out, I couldn't believe how fast the planting went. Within 30 minutes I probably had all of my plants in there. I got some hostas for free from one of my parents neighbors. They are super big right now, but my garden expert told me that in the fall they'll die off and start from scratch next spring and they should be just what I want.

Now, onto the side garden!

There wasn't a side garden for me to start with - so I started out by digging up some grass. This was hard heavy labor, but I got most of it done before my mom came to go out to the Depot.