3.18.09 - 3.19.09

3.18.09 - I had a pretty rough week at the office, so I did a little "gardening therapy". Went by my favorite clearance-plants hook-up Wednesday night and bought about $8.00 worth of their near-dead plants. Two dog-eared coleus, three large dianthus, and several 6-packs and 4" pots of marigolds. I got them all planted that night. I also got a contractor's flat of smaller dianthus. The marigolds all went in the boxes, near and around the 'maters and peppers. The dianthus and coleus found homes in the foot or so of soil between the sidewalk's edge and the fenceline. The Great Outdoors has strawberry plants for next to nothing, so while I'm filling one of my boxes with them, I'm also going to dot them along the fence line. The box will have a cage-top to protect those berries for me and Trent, and the ones along the fence line will be sacrificed to the birds.

My dianthus collection will surely over the coming weeks, from a couple of contractor's flats of mounding dianthus, to include several cluster-blooming, long stemmed varieties and some mini-carnations, then some more coleus, and finally, a TON of amazing herbs.

Later plans include mulch and a cedar edging to help keep everything in its place...

yep, that's a farmer tan!!

3.19.09 - ‘K…Here are my plans for today/this weekend:

Leave here and go all the way south to TGO to get more strawberry plants (34 of them, I think). Bring ‘em home and get them into the ground.

Go into backyard and thin the creeping jenny that’s taken over about ¼ of one of my beds and bring those plugs to the front to add to the dianthus and strawberries around the gate. The cj will make a PERFECT edging. It will help keep the soil from running out of the yard and onto the sidewalk and looking all crummy, and will be gorgeous against the darker greens of the dianthus and strawberry foliage.

I’ll also try to get the last of the lumber for the blue fence and get started on that. We’ll finish installing that this weekend, and I can start moving plants from the backyard to that area.

I think I’ll be able to get my last 4 boxes filled with soil ( and weed cloth, and the grid) and start getting those planted. I have soooo many seedlings of flowers that I can’t WAIT to see growing! One or two of the remaining 4 grids will be for food, the rest will be for flowers.

Plant watermelons and maybe cantaloupes alongside the blue fence. Under the rose bushes and other plants. I mean to maximize the HECK out of my property lines!

Run also going to run a soaker hose along that bed AND (and this is the REALLY cool part) will splice that into a hose, which I will bury under the pavers that will eventually go along the side of the garage (replacing the grass) in that alley leading to the back gate. The hose will come out of the ground somewhere inconspicuous, where I can just clip the garden hose to it and turn it on. The water will pass through the buried garden hose, to the soaker hose! This won’t be complete for some time, but in the end, it will be a LOT easier to water this way, than to run the front yard hose across all of the front garden (without doing any damage) and over the driveway to the soaker. I’ll do that for the time being, but it’s already a hassle getting that long hose around without it going over or through a box. I have to be really careful.

And that's all she wrote, folks!