Gardening is not my cup-o-tea

For fours year now all I wanted was a great looking yard.  Thats all.  When I first moved into my place the house had been empty for a while.  The yard was way overgrown.  I came in and hand chopped down some things then I had someone come in with a bobcat to chop the rest down.  If you read my 1st book you know the story already.

When I first moved here and I stood in my driveway looking at the road this is what I saw…

That drove me crazy.

This is the same area.  Since then I have had some trees cut down and the rest trimmed up

And the area behind the leaning tree is what I want to talk about.

Yesterday I got up at 7AM  to get some yard work done. Someone gave me a bag full of  green border plants (Monkey Grass) and I wanted to get them in the ground before they die.  I know what you are thinking…DON’T DO IT.  Yeah  I know… they grow and grow and if you are not careful they will take over.

Well being a person that can’t grow anything successfully but weeds and invasive crap… I am planting it.  I have some variegated ones in the front. I started with one big clump and every year I go out there and dig it up and break it up into smaller clumps and replant them.  They made it all the way to the end of my walkway this year.  (I made that walkway too BTW)

They are nice and full and they look nice when there are no leaves on the ground and the flowers are in bloom.  I wanted some solid green ones by my front though.  I think they  will look nice around my beds….and maybe they will keep the grass from spreading into the flower beds.

OK so before I could even start I had to rake out about 6 inches of leaves… then I couldn’t just leave the beds clean and the yard look like heck so I had to rake from the beds to the street. I swear the pile was almost as tall as me.  I did not take any photos yesterday and today when I went out there to snap a shot more than half the leaves had blown all over the place…

The leaves were very heavy to rake so that is why I did not even get them to the woods line.  I need to invest in another blower.  I lost my last blower when I was moving and  I have no earthly idea where it could be.  I have to assume when the house was being shown it was stolen because before that it was there. I  do have a chipper that would grind these leaves down to nothing but I swear I did not feel like dragging that heavy thing out of the barn…plus I have a trillion things in front of it so I would have had to empty out the barn to get to it…no fun in that.

Anyway after I do all that I try to dig in the ground. Well let me tell you… cold wet ground is very hard to dig into. I gave up… I took the shovel and broke up the ground a little then I got 3 huge bags of dirt, spread it in a line and planted the plants in that. LOL I know, I know, you don’t have to say it…that was some lazy crap right there. Wellllllll…it took me 3 hours to rake that little area up and and I wanted to plant my crap and get back in the house…it was cold out there.  If they survive the winter I plan on getting a load of dirt in the Spring and build up the bed a little and then it can spread, spread, spread.  I will be happy till I find a snake in them then I probably will dig them up.

For now it does not even look that much different.  I am sure people passing by are wondering what the heck I am up to now.

SMH…Gardening is just not my cup of tea!!

All I keep thinking about is I can’t wait till spring when I can plant me some Benary Giant Zinnia’s that I read about on another blog (VictoriaElizabethBarnes.com).  In my mind I have planned to buy a load of dirt and have it dumped on this flower bed.  It might not look that big in the photo but it is about 20′ wide so a load of dirt will be just about right.  After I rake it around my 3 year old mock orange bush that I am waiting to take off (they are next to that tall tall weed in the photo) and anything else that might look like it survived, I will be collecting clear plastic containers that some foods come in (like strawberries) and using them to plant my Zinnia seeds.  I will be doing this in my garden window. When it gets warm I will  plant them then cross my fingers and prey they grow.

Oh and I will be using black mulch next year.  Yes Black mulch.  It looks like rich dirt to me and I think it looks fantastic.  I am finally going to stop with all this gaudy looking red mulch.  Last year I purchased about 40 bags of much then realized it would take hundreds of bags so I then got two loads of mulch and I still have places where I could use some more.  Next year I am planting all my crap from seeds and buying only soil and mulch by the truckload.  That’s the plan anyway.  I say the same thing every year then when the sale and planting frenzy starts I lose my mind and after things calm down I come to my senses and buy the stuff in bulk.  This is no stamp size yard this is a whole envelope and I have to remember that.

Oh yeah and hopefully I can finally get this dead tree cut down.  I got four big ones cut down already and I have two more to go.  One a year.  Fingers crossed they don’t topple before then.