Halfway to a new garden!

The garden project is coming along!

We managed to rototill the area we want to plant, which is most of the front of our house and along the side.

It was an eventful day!  As it turns out there were a lot of things already planted in our garden-to-be.  Such as:  gigantic rocks, wasp nests, and the invisible fence line!  As you can imagine we were delighted at our findings, but rather than celebrate, we still had to ready the area for our new shrubs and flowers.

With my mothers help, I had arranged all the plants where we wanted them to go, or maybe more aptly, where they needed to go.  Big A measured each plant from the house and made a map of the garden-to-be.  I also took pictures of the area with the plants laid out so that we could use the photos as reference.



He then used spray paint to outline the edge of the garden.  I have to admit, we were not precise with the outline of the garden.  Our criteria was that it had to be about 5' out from the foundation, because some of the shrubs have a 10' spread when they are full grown.  Also, the garden itself had to encompass some of the huge boulders we have near the house so that Big A didn't have to move them!  Fair point!

Then Big A got to work with the rototiller.

The ground was very dry and had a lot of clay and rocks - big rocks.   I wanted to run the rototiller myself, however, when I saw how much it was pulling, even for Big A, I thought I'd better not push my luck.  (At that point we'd already been stung by wasps and I didn't want to end up in the ER with a missing limb...)  So while he rototilled, I raked, cleared out the sod and rocks, and maybe most importantly, dealt with our other two helpers - the dog and the 4 year old.  Helpers can be hard to manage!  But I have my ways:



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We finished with the area rototilled and raked ready for planting.  This part of the process took us about 7 hours total.  We were very happy when it was finished, cuz it was admittedly a long and tiring day, compounded by finding wasp nests, and dealing with 90 degree heat. By 5 p.m. we called it quits and headed to my in-laws pool!

Which. Was. Heaven. :-)