Garden

Productive planting

Yesterday was an incredibly productive day. I mean seriously productive. I got up at 4:50 a.m. and went to a spinning class. When I got home, I took my dog for a walk before work. I made breakfast for two days and lunch. I got a ton of stuff done at work, too. AND when I got home, we made dinner that I had marinated overnight before running to Home Depot to buy mulch. And yes, I spread it, too! This seriously never happens! I don’t know what took over and said “You are not gonna sit still for a single second today,” but it needs to happen way more often.

On to my productive planting…

This weekend my dad met up with a parent he met at on of Elliott’s baseball games go was splitting her perennials. She gave him an entire trunk-full of plants for us to plant in our yard! Thank you so much, Rene!

Free plants

We got right to work unloading and planning where to plant our plants so we could get them back in the ground and soaked with water. Three hours later we planted two hastas, three liriope, a bunch of lamb’s ear, a bunch of fern…. and a ton of other stuff we didn’t know the name of. We also transplanted one of my strawberry patches to join it with the other patch, so now I have one huge patch! Yummo.

Last night on my productive spree, I dragged the hubby (OK, OK, he went rather willingly) to Home Depot to buy mulch so I could mulch my new garden beds. We bought 15 bags for only $1.48 each. Score!

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In the photo above we have some daffodils braided down on the left and my strawberry patch on the right. I’m not crazy about daffodils, so I am thinking I might eventually make the whole thing a strawberry patch šŸ˜€

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This picture is less exciting, seeing as I don’t know the name of this plant, but it has pretty purple flowers and will hopefully wind up the fence when it grows. It also shows my next plan for my garden, which is lining all of my beds with big(ish) rocks. The tricky part — I don’t want to pay for them haha. I will be rock Ā scavenging to try to complete this task. I’m starting with the beds on the side of the house so the incompleteness won’t be super obvious when you drive by. I think it will look really great when it’s done.

This weekend I’ll be planting six tomato plants, which is absurd because how many tomatoes does one person really need? And yes, only one person in our house eats them — me!

I got three regular plants, one Roma plant and two cherry tomato plants. CAN’T WAIT FOR TOMATOES!

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Speaking of gardening… my broccoli are doing well (I think). We cut down the itty bitty tree right behind our car port earlier this spring to help get my garden bed a bit more light. The broccoli lookĀ like they are doing well, but I know my dad’s plants will be 80 times the size because of their direct sunlight all day long. I think this year will be really telling for future garden plans. I thought about moving my garden to the back corner of the yard that gets more sun, but that was gonna be way more expensive so I decided to give this area one more try.
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And to round out a productive planting post… you know what isn’t productive?

This guy….

He just wants to play in the dirt and chase water from the hose. In fact, last night he took to crying when we stopped playing with the hose. Needless to say, he was rather soaked by the time we went inside for the night.

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And when he isn’t sidetracking me from gardening, he’s certainly not being productive inside….

Lazy bones!

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Home Improvement

Rocks, rocks, rocks and more rocks

{A Smith of All Trades} My House

I’m really trying to improve the curb appeal of our house. I don’t think the house is super cute on the outside, and the yard, well it needs a lot of love. We started boosting our curb appeal with our pretty new doors, but now that that project is complete it is time to move on to the next one.

I won’t claim to know a lot about landscaping. In fact, I really struggle with it. Thankfully, my dad has a total green thumb and quite the eye for landscaping. He’s been telling me for a year now that we need to fix the rock bed that lines our driveway. If you look in the photo above, the rock bed is to the right of our truck… you probably can’t see it because it is covered in weeds. Yeah.

My dad started on this project by himself last weekend, digging up about two feet of rocks and leaving them in our driveway while I worked on weeding in our backyard. A week inĀ IndianapolisĀ kept him away from the project all week, but Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, we went to town!

Rocks

It takes hours to dig out the rocks and separate them from the weeds and dirt. It’s tough on your back and rough on your hands, but the reward for the effort is certainly visible.

We only got about 16 feet completed, and have another 25 or so to do — thank goodness there is only about 3 feet of rocks on the other side of the driveway!

Anyway, once we dug out a large enough section of rocks, we sprayed the canal with weed killer and laid black garbage bags to act as a weed barrier. Then, we place all of the rocks back into the long section we’d dug out, keeping as much dirt out as possible.

Rocks

On the left is how the rocks should look, and on the right is the area we still haven’t touched. What a difference, huh?

Rocks

We only have about a third of the driveway done, but it sure looks a lot nicer!

And, as if we hadn’t done enough with the rocks, we also decided to bring up some of the rocks in our backyard (we have several little rock beds running along our house) to continue our driveway behind our truck. There was already a section of rocks there, but there was about 4 feet of just dirt and no rocks. Many trips back and forth later, and that section is coming along nicely, too.

Rocks

My little brother was a huge help and was the main rock transporter for this project… that is until we found a snake and the world’s largest spider living in the rock pile. Understandably, he wasn’t too crazy about messing around with the rocks after that.

I won’t be sad when the rock pile is gone and those critters are a little farther away from our house.

Once this project is complete, I am hoping to tackle our crooked lamp post! That thing has been driving me crazy since we moved in a year ago.