Hoping to Grow a Green Thumb

I have always loved the idea of gardening. It seems so calming and productive. When we moved into this house, the front flowerbed was lovely. As time went by, the previous owner's plantings died off and we started planting no-brainer plants - aloe, grasses and various other cactus.

Last year, I attacked the boxwood hedge, taking out all but three of them. I had always wanted to plant flowers in that bed, but never got around to it. Last week, I walked out into the yard and decided it was time to do what I have always wanted to do with the front of the house.

Since Darling Man and ZBoy were going camping Thursday night and I would have Kylee on Friday, I decided to enlist her aid and we would spend Friday gardening!

First, we went to the bank, then to Lowes to pick out flowers and mulch. I also got her a pair of gardening gloves because none of mine would fit her. Then we went home and fueled our bodies for the task at hand with scrambled egg and cheese taquitos!

Kylee picked out the flowers... I think she did a lovely job! We had two flats of impatiens and eight petunias:

As I explained to her, before you can put flowers in, you have to pull the weeds out and make the ground ready so the flowers will be able to grow. So we spent the first couple of hours pulling weeds - both in the lawn and in the lower flower bed (I'd already weeded the other bed).

After a while, we took a break from weeding and planted my birthday roses and the petunias. It's always a little sad how droopy they look after being planted.

After planting the higher bed, we went back to weeding the lower one (were are A LOT of weeds). We'd been at it for a short time when the Bruce and Derrick Show started.

The house across the street from us is a rental. The owners are quite choosy about who lives there and who works on the house. We've been wondering about the house lately, as the cars for the people who live there only show up about once a week. We were thinking that perhaps they're in the process of moving out. The owners always take the unoccupied time to do lots of work on the place, so when two guys showed up and went into the garage, it wasn't an unusual occurrence. What was unusual was how loud and coarse they were. Let's just say that while their vocabulary was limited, it was extremely colorful. So colorful that I finally had to send Kylee inside because they just never stopped. Well, they did get quiet briefly when I walked over to the street and wrote down their tag number, but it didn't last long. They yelled each other's names everytime they cursed each other which is how I know that they were Bruce (an older guy) and Derrick (a younger guy). Apparently Bruce is worried for Derrick's soul because Derrick rather loudly stated that he hated God. And in that oh-so-lovely language, they argued about salvation, souls, and how Bruce was putting the piece on the wrong f***ing way. Somewhat ironic two days before Easter. They finally left and Kylee came back out so we could finish up.

Everything does look a bit droopy and small, but impatiens grow very fast and well here so in no time at all, I should have lots of color (no thanks to Bruce and Derrick) in my front yard! I did go back and clean the concrete off and added my gnome under the boxwood. And everything perked up a lot overnight, so this morning I got to see how lovely the whole thing turned out!

Today? Container vegetable gardening in the back yard!