We’ve had quite the eventful week. With temperatures hovering around 70 in the day and 50 at night we determined last weekend would be the weekend to go plant shopping. Initially we anticipated going Saturday, but knowing how busy our favorite nursery (Growers Outlet in Loganville) gets we decided to skip out of work a little early (that’s like crazy talk for us!) and go on the mini road trip on Friday afternoon instead. Can you tell we’re spoiled intown people who consider anything further than 10 miles away a road trip? Haha. So we made the one hour ride up there. I was so excited I had butterflies  how dorky am I! I’ve been trying to come up with a good garden plan for the area next to the shed for a little while. Since our back yard gets pretty shady in the summer when all the trees are grown in, and since the bed I was planning was on the north side of the shed I had to make sure the plants were shade loving. Plus we want to keep as many plants perennials as we can.
So some hours and $97 later we ended up with around 60 plants. (More if you count the fact that some plants came in six packs.)
Plus our friend from West End gave us a whole bunch of hostas! Thanks Debbie!
So of course it was night and we wouldn’t get to planting until Saturday, but at least we could plant all day instead of spending half of it at the nursery. Which was clearly needed time with all those plants! So we finished dinner and I was in the process of pre-rinsing the dishes and…”Oh crap!” (me)…”What happened?!” (Patrick)…”I cut myself with the steak knife” (me  staring in shock at my cut between the index and middle finger with flesh just floppin’ around under the running water). Well that didn’t really fit in with my plans of planting. *big sigh* Such an inconvenient spot too where you can’t really put a bandaid or anything. Interestingly enough it didn’t hurt at all. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say “at all” because it obviously wasn’t comfortable, but the pain was less than the three days I always suffer from an ant bite! Needless to say I was more of a planting assistant the next dayÂ
One of the things we finally were able to plant was the raised garden bed that we built a few weeks earlier. It looks like this year we’ll have a garden bed with only tomatoes and bell peppers. From left to right we’ve got the bell peppers, “Sweet Million” tomatoes, “Roma” tomatoes, and “Celebrity” tomatoes.
So like I mentioned, my big project was the north side of the shed. In previous years I think we’ve done bad planting, not being conscious of the requirements for the plants we were putting there. (I’ll use the “I’m a newbie gardener” excuse.) So we tore out the dead rose we bought our first spring and transplanted the other living rose to the southern side of the house. Then we planted three Cast Iron plants, two McKana’s Columbines, two Tiger Stripe Foamflowers, four Chocolate Chip Bugleweeds, and one Lungwort Opal.
In the space by the back steps we dug up the Weigela Carnaval we planted the first spring and transplanted it in a pot for the time being. In place we put another Cast Iron plant and Debbie’s Hostas. I’m not sure which kind they are. Same scenario as the north side of the shed, this area seems to get a lot of shade in the summer with all the trees, so I think between the shade and the fact that the area floods during rain the Weigela wasn’t happy in that spot. Hopefully these plants should fare better in this location. I’m liking it in any case!
On the other side of the steps we’ve planted Purple Fountain Grass the past two years (annuals). This year we thought we’d try three little Fiber Optic Grass. The ivy that we’ve moved around for years in that spot seems to be following the rule of “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps”. It’s been rather contained up until this point, but this spring it’s really exploded and is growing up the side of the stairs. I know I’ve been cursing the English Ivy growing all over our property, but as long as we can contain this one I like the idea of it clinging onto the ugly cement stairs.
In the front step pots (the ones that have the Confederate Jasmine) we planted a Verbena, a Creeping Jenny, and a Potato Vine (left to right).
We planted three more of Debbie’s Hostas in our “woodland garden” behind the shed. Then our neighbor decided to cut the tree off his shed one evening this week. Back in November a neighbor’s tree fell, landing on their shed and partially ours. Back then the neighbor cut the tree on our property off, but had left the trunk lying on his shed until now. To our dismay we found the trunk on our fence and woodland garden the next morning. Not sure what he was trying to achieve by rolling the trunk off the shed’s roof and onto our fence? I know the fence was only crappy chicken wire and I want to get rid of it real bad, but that didn’t mean I wanted it crushed by the tree in the meanwhile! Although our bigger worry was probably our poor little plants getting crushed! All things considered if it had to crush any plants, the plants it fell on were the best option. It smashed one new Hosta, which happened to be the smallest of all the ones we planted, and one Fern. Who knows, maybe the Fern will recover and the Hosta come back next year?
I missed taking photos of a few other things that were planted so I’ll post about them next time. In the meanwhile my fingers are still wrapped up from my cut. I’m eager for it to heal now! A week of wrapped together fingers is getting annoying.
