Interior yardage

Good Monday morning, my friends.  Hope you were able to celebrate yesterday with the moms in your life!

My wife and I spent a fair amount of time getting our yard in shape yesterday.  Last fall we determined that we needed a bit of a makeover in our back yard, since some of the plants we had put into our planting beds over the past few years were either overgrown or unhealthy.  So at that time and into the early winter I went about clearing out some of the old stuff.  Pulled an azalea plant that had never flourished (I'll come back to the subject of azaleas shortly), yanked a sickly holly bush from the ground with one hand, and chopped eight juniper bushes down to ground level, planning to remove them when we had a plan for replacement.

Fast forward to two months ago, and we examined the remaining three azaleas, which were originally quite pretty adjacent to our living room window that looks out onto the back yard.  They were also a bit spotty.  Sadly, they also came out of the ground without a fight, so they and our very clay-like soil never really got along, despite all of the additives and mulch I included when planting them.

We'd made a couple of trips to garden centers simply to get ideas, but in the meantime discovered that the ivy we used as ground cover on parts of the sides of our house was also looking a little peaked.  So I cut all of that out and was left with some twigs and such.  We decided to leave the roots intact in the event it decides to come back, which it has done before.

So, anyway, Saturday was youth sports day, as our grandson had a t-ball game mid-morning, and our granddaughter played two soccer games in the afternoon.  And it was warm, but breezy.  So we both were feeling the heat, so to speak.

Over a postgame sandwich we agreed we'd go to one of the home improvement stores to scout for new plants for, well, all of the spaces I mentioned.  Went to two different locations, and that night developed a plan.

Yesterday morning I went back to store #2 and bought what we'd agreed upon.  I won't go into detail, but we're allowing a little more space between some of the plants and decided to go a little simpler (our previous plan with the junipers, for example, allowed space initially, but they thrived to the point  that we inadvertently created a hedge, which was not what we wanted) this time around.

So I started this process after I got everything home, planted three of the items in question without incident, but then had to start prying up the roots of our eight juniper plants.  Three gave quite a struggle, but all eventually gave in to me and my trusty mattock (think pickaxe--if you ever have to dig up plants yourself I highly recommend it).  That allowed us to plant two more things on the front of our main planting bed, and we'll likely add one or two plants to that later.

This morning I went out early and planted the rest, spread more mulch (we buy the rubberized stuff for durability, as it's pretty expensive to replace shredded cypress mulch every year) and watered all of our new stuff.  And our timing is excellent, as we're due to get several days of rain starting tomorrow.

Full disclosure--I have no particular skills in gardening and such, and am not really that fond of it.  But my wife is.  So I do it for her, because it makes her happy.  And I do gain a certain amount of satisfaction from my efforts.

So I'm still pretty sore but it's better than it was yesterday.

Have a good week.




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