I am no longer sad

I finally finished our front flower bed.  After looking at it for two or three summers and feeling sad about it, and spending hours weeding it and planting and replanting a few plants in there, it is done.  I was going to get some landscaping rock like we have in our backyard, but was unable to find it so I decided to go with mulch. 

I don't know how well the plants on the right here will do as they grow along the ground and send down roots.  Not sure if they will be able to send roots down through the mulch and landscape fabric.

I am impressed with how well the bleeding hearts are doing.  I don't think they have ever flowered this much!

Yard Work

I have not been able to muster up motivation to clean the house for anything.....but I have probably spent at least four or five hours outside this weekend doing yard work.  Things like weeding, planting, watering, fertilizing, mowing, etc.  I often feel like I wish I knew more about plants and growing things, but I do find a lot of satisfaction in planting things and watching them grow. 

I think that this is quite possibly the nicest May long weekend we have had in three or four years.  It has been sunny and around +25C each day.  I ended up not having any bookings at work on Friday, so I get an extra long weekend.  I sure didn't mind as we were able to go out first thing in the morning and pick up some plants and I came home and mowed the lawn, did some weeding and set out to do some planting.  We bought a couple of large planters from Home Depot to put on our deck.  I am really happy with the way they turned out, and I think that they add a whole other dimension to our yard.

I am pleased to report that all of our shrubs survived the winter this year.  Even the 3 that I planted last fall are coming back nicely.  Our linden tree, that we transplanted three years ago, looks fuller than it has since we first transplanted it.    We planted a couple of perennial flowers last fall, one is an echinaccea and I don't know what the other one is, those two and our clamatis were the only things that didn't survive the winter.  I replaced all three and am hoping with the warm weather that they will get a good chance to get established before the fall/winter comes.

My next big project is finishing the front flower bed.  It has been the bane of my existence (okay, maybe that's an exaggeration!) for a couple of years.  When we got our yard landscaped I wasn't sure what I would do in that flower bed.  Approximately 75% of that flower bed gets no direct sunlight, and it can be hard to get things to grow well there, so I thought I would try out some different plants and see how it went.  The first year I planted two bleeding hearts (which I had no idea love shade so much!) and three hostas.  The hostas did not flourish, but they seemed to do okay, and the bleeding hearts did okay.  The next year, only one hosta made a reappearance but the bleeding hearts came back.  Last year I decided to plant some ground cover type plants because the soil was looking ugly and growing moss and lots of weeds.  I picked up some periwinkle (I think that's what it's called) and it has survived the winter and is actually flowering already. 

Today I went back to Home Depot to pick up some landscape fabric and some mulch to finish off the front bed.  I planted a couple more bleeding hearts yesterday and I swear they have grown since yesterday!  I was going to use lanscape rock, but decided it would be easier to just do mulch.  I bought black mulch, which I already put under the crabapple tree in our front yard and I think it looks quite sharp.  Better than the sparse, moldy, red and brown chips that the landscapers put under there three years ago.  I did not realize they were moldy until I started digging them out and it was kind of gross.  I am thinking it was from all the water that the sump pump dumped on our lawn last summer.  I am hoping that this summer will be dryer and that our sump pump will remain dormant.

I also purchased some weed killer for our dandilions.  I have never seen them so bad as they are this year.  The ditches along the freeway are more yellow than green.  And as a result, everyone's lawns are quite full of them.  I don't know if it was the wet year last year, or if this is the first year that the city has stopped spraying for them, but I just cannot get over how bad they are.  I thought by mowing the lawn on Friday that it might slow them down for a bit, but no, by Saturday they were back worse....I guess I must have just spread the seeds around.  :P

A few photos to show off all of the hard work I did :)

 Here is one of our new planters.  I put one in either corner of the deck.  I really like the grassy spike that I planted in the middle, and I am looking forward to seeing the snapdragons and petunias grow and fill out throughout the summer.

Here are our tomato plants.  I had planted tulip bulbs in this planter last fall and was hoping to have some lovely tulips this spring, but I either planted them incorrectly, or the bulbs were duds.  So this will be our tomato planter once again!  We planted roma tomatoes this year, and I can't wait to eat them.

Here is our new clamatis.  It is better established than the one I planted last year, and hopefully we won't get any terrible wind storms in the next while so it can have a change to establish.  Last year's clamatis was broken off in a wind storm on the May long weekend.

Our planter of pretty flowers.  I planted snapdragons and pansies this year.  As well, the one with green leaves and no flowers is the echinaccea, then further down is the one I don't know what it is, and right down at the end is a rose bush that I transplanted out of the ground last year, and it is just barely starting to grow back.  Hopefully it will make a comeback this year!

This is the periwinkle that I planted last year.  It seems to like the shade quite a bit.

Here are my bleeding hearts, they are doing very well already.

A full shot of the front flower bed.  It might not look so ugly right now, but to me it just makes me feel sad.  The dirt looks dry and cracked and there is moss....I really think that the mulch will really dress it up.  I also have some ideas for planting some flowers in 'pots' placed in the bed once it is finished.

I know it's a bit dark, but here is our thunderchild crabapple tree with the black mulch under it.  I think it looks really nice.  Also the tree is just starting to flower, love those pink blossoms.

Here is the pot we have at the front of our house by our garage.  This photo doesn't do the geranium justice as it is the most beautiful hot pinky/purplish colour.  The smaller plants are trailing lobelia in a dark purple.  They should grow and hang over the edge of the pot.

Our latest addition

My parents and I spent a few hours last night putting it together. It was pretty easy, just took some time to get it put together. I look forward to putting things in it :)

I thought I loved the rain

I was so happy to see it pour rain today. This is our first day of rain since last year I think. We have had bits of rain, and cloudy days, but no days of nearly nonstop rain. I was so happy to sit inside and watch it pour and see how extra green all my shrubs were looking. At one point the dog asked to go out for a pee. She is not too keen on going out by herself in the rain, so I told her she would have until the rain slowed down a bit. At this point it was raining sheets and I could hardly see the house behind ours through the rain. Finally it did slow down so I took her out.

For some odd reason I decided to look beside our house, I don't usually when I take the dog out. The first thing I noticed was that our window well was at least half or more full of water. Crap. So I took the dog for a pee, then came back inside and trudged down to the basement. The bedroom, who's window is in that window well, carpet was soaked about half way across the room (and under the wall into the adjoining room). Crap. I looked up and water was at least half way up the window. Unfortunately windows are not water tight. Crap. So I went and told Jay who was laying down for a rest. Then I headed outside to start bailing water. I probably pulled at least 10 or 12 buckets of water out of the window well before it was only about an inch or inch and a half full and I was confident it would drain the rest out on it's own. Then I went downstairs and got the shop vac and realized the only attachment we have for it is a one inch pipe. So I set do vacuuming half of the bedroom (thankfully there is no bed in that room, just boxes and a few chairs).

I decided to call mom and dad to see if they had either another shop vac, or better attachments and dad figured he did, so they came over to help. We took turns vacuuming, though mom did a good portion of it. When I had gone out to bail the water I determined that a good part of the problem with why there was so much water in the window well was the fact that there is a downspout a couple of feet away from the window well, and it had rained so much, so fast that all the water ran down into the window well. There is also a problem with the grade of the lot right there. The window well is the low point. I am hoping that when we finally get a chance to talk to the landscapers that they will be willing to fix that.

While mom was vacuuming, dad and I ran over to Home Depot before they closed to get an extension hose for the downspout. We found one that works well enough, but it wasn't quite as long as I was hoping we might find. Dad went out there during the last downpour though, to see if the water was draining the right way, and he said it appears to be. However with the poor grade near the window well, when we get a huge downpour that the eaves cannot handle, if the water runs over it will run down into the window well. I hope that we will not get too many downpours of that level before we can get the grade sorted out.

All that I have to say was that I felt tired before this all started. Now I feel physically tired from the vacuuming and bailing water. I feel emotionally tired from being frustrated/upset about this whole thing. I think that I will sleep well tonight. Well unless it rains hard, then I will be paranoid all night that the basement is filling with water.