Making Yard Progress!

A battle has been won in the epic war to bring our yard back from complete anarchy & chaos!

This is the current battle zone: the flowerbed to the right of the front door steps.

As you can clearly see, it's been a bit overrun with weeds.  Just a bit.  But it's nothing that a huge jug of Roundup can't handle!  I promise you, I pumped the pump on that jug so many times that my arms got sore.  But it was worth it.  Within 36 hours all those weeds were dead.

The pics above and below this line are of our two surviving hostas from last year.  Poor things - the one below is especially pathetic.  But one green leaf denotes survivor to me!  That's all it takes to get another chance in my flower bed!

After the Roundup worked it's magic, all I had to do was take a pointed shovel & skive off the top layer of dirt & dead weeds.  I put it off for a few days thinking it was going to be so hard but it wasn't really that bad.  I was done in no time.

G-pa aka The Hosta Man gave us a couple more hostas to plant in our flower bed.  He is so generous & despite my horrible track record, he has faith that I won't kill his gifts.  Time will tell.  I planted them spaced out in a row along the back of the flower bed.

My mom went with me to a local greenhouse (where I was a cashier during the summer in my college years) to help me pick out some shade lovers for our spot.  We got a few of these colorful Coleus.  I love their frilly leaves!

And I bought a whole flat of Impatiens.  I don't know what I was thinking.  That's something like 48 little flower plants.  That's a whole lot of time on your knees with a trowel in hand!

So I arranged the back row to be hosta, coleus, hosta, coleus, etc.  And then I planted the impatiens all along the front of the bed in several staggered rows.  Planting the impatiens was a bit frustrating because our maple trees (you remember, the ones that have almost totally destroyed our sewer line?) have roots all through this flower bed.  Some of the roots were small enough I could hack through them with my trowel but some of the were so big I just had to pick a different spot for the flower.  It worked out ok, I think.

And here is the finished product1  It's looking lovely & I just have to remember to water it faithfully & put down some Preen so the weeds don't get out of control.  It feels SO GOOD to have this little project done!