Spring Planting

I mentioned last week about working in the yard during these wonderful, sunny days (Please, please rain!). Saturday we made a couple trips to the Home Depot nursery department (actually one trip each to two different HDs) and acquired the plants needed to rejuvenate the front flower beds, add some color to the beds around the new trees, and of course, some tomato plants.

The problem with bringing 37 plants home is that you need 37 holes in the ground to put them in (Is that a cloud in the sky?). Okay, I confess - 24 of the plants were from a flat of marigolds, and Barb made short work of those holes with nothing more than her hand trowel. And sure, three more were tomato plants that she put in pots, but hey, I had to hold the pots while she mixed up the potting soil!

That leaves 10 shrubs that really and truly needed serious holes. Let me just go on record that Barb  conducted herself with great restraint while I was jumping up and down on the shovel trying to get it to go into the ground. She didn't even laugh (much) when I fell off the shovel. I think she was too concerned about driving me to the ER. But we did get the holes dug and successfully planted 6 Dwarf Nandinas and 4 Youpon Holly bushes. (I think I felt a drop of rain!)

Okay, bush may be too pretentious a word; maybe they are bushlets. But, hey - they want a lot of money for the big-boy versions of these shrubs. We'll just have to live with a snaggle-toothed garden for a while. We had big-boy versions of all these replacement plants, but between the drought and the freeze we had a little natural selection and only the hardiest survived. (That's it! The temperature is dropping! Quick, get indoors before the we get buried under two feet of snow!)

Now all I have to do is transplant about 30 more linear feet of monkey grass (Sunstroke! Too much sun; Must go sit in shade!)

If you look closely, you can see the marigolds around our bare naked trees.

And our snaggle-tooth plants -