I am glad for this weekend to have arrived. Yay! The baby garden is shaping up now. The first couple of years will be bare, but that is okay. This is the year for annuals while I decide on perennials.
We need a ton of mulch for the beds in the front and back, but I figured that would wait until next year since any money spent was going towards the plantings. Well, one of our neighbors stopped by and said she had extra mulch in her driveway and that we could have it. We offered to pay for it, but she didn’t want to take any because it was good to see the neglected house being taken care of. How nice is that? All of our neighbors seem really nice.
Anyway, we hauled that mulch over 1 wheelbarrow at at time. It was a lot of mulch, too. She would have had to pay to have someone haul it all away. We filled up the big front bed and have a bunch left to put probably in the back or on the other side of the front.
A lot less weeding will be happening now. Up here, anyway.
The mulch makes everything pop, like my mushroom:
The cleome have some blooms on them. These are supposed to be 3 to 4 feet tall by later in the summer to help fill in this spot.
This is my baby calycanthus shrub.
It has a ways to go to get to 5 feet tall 😀
This is the cosmos:
I have never had cosmos or cleome in my gardens before.
The other side of the front is the wild and wooly side.
I will be really glad when those bushes are gone.
The back garden is coming along. We have this tree/shrub thing that is blooming.
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It provides a shady canopy and now that I got the ground cover cleared out from beneath it, I put in some of Debby’s fairy impatiens that she sent to me.
My sad little back garden. My roses are doing well, though, and have some buds on them! This bed is going to take a long time to get going, but that is the fun part.
I want to buy allllllll the plants for here 😀
The back yard is great for gathering, too. We had cake and firepit enjoyment!
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Have a great weekend!
Oh my gosh–that cake looks fantastic!! And a fire pit sounds so nice too. So do you have mosquitos back there? I have them and it keeps me from spending prolonged time in the garden. I need to find something to do about that.
And your front bed looks pretty already. Unreal how generous your neighbors have been.
Now that you have one impatien growing, next year you will have hundreds. Well, maybe a little exaggeration, but not much!
The cake was pretty amazing. John outdid himself. Italian cream cake. We put the beeswax candle on it because we didn’t have birthday candles (they got thrown out when we moved).
We get lots of mosquitoes in the yard. I use deep woods Off or I blot on some citronella oil. With John’s business, we have a big can of citronella essential oil available. We also have ticks. I found one on me a few weeks ago. I am hoping with the clearing out of debris in the beds that the ticks will move on, but there is a wooded lot near the house, so it’s not surprising to have them (they were at our old place, too).
I can’t wait to watch your garden as it evolves! Love your patio/fire pit, too.
(I think that bush with the clusters of white flowers is one of the many kinds of Viburnum. So pretty!)
I am searching viburnum to see if this is one. I might take a small branch to the garden center and see what they think. It’s tall and drapy, almost like a small tree.
Okaaayy who’s wearing socks with sandals…?? NOOoooooo lol Your flowerbeds are going to be wonderful Lori and they look nice already… patience..uuughhh… Is that white shrub in the back a viburnum? Hugs! deb
Who else would be wearing socks with sandals but me?
Your gardens are looking great. The flowering shady bush you mentioned looks like it might be a cranberry bush, the flower head blooms and leaves look like the one I own.
Now back to my own gardens in Northern NY.
The garden looks lovely, if you don’t mind I stick around the next couple of years to see how it will look in a couple of years 🙂
Fashionable those sandals and socks 🙂 Looks great that you got to celebrate your birthday outside. And the cake looks so good.
I was going to fuss that you are not allowed to put a cake on the blog and not tell what it is, then I saw you told Debby in your comment 😀
Italian Cream Cake is one of my favorite kinds of cake!
You really are doing a great job fixing up those gardens. It must be hard to be patient and wait for the money to get all the plants you want. And how great is free mulch!!
It’s really coming along nicely.