Grow where you are planted

As I write this I am in Iowa and enjoying spending time with my folks and looking forward to this upcoming weekend when we will be celebrating Christmas and the 40th Anniversary of Mom adopting the 3 of us kids.  I can't imagine 2 weeks before Christmas suddenly have  a 1,2, and 3 year old.  Tomorrow Betsy and David, my husband Wayne and Chris should all arrive.  Will be the first time in a while that we have all been here together (usually Wayne is missing because of deployments or such).

I thought I would try to spend a little of my time here trying to catch up a little bit on my blogging which is so far behind as to be ridiculous.  I apologise to those who like to keep up with what is going on in my life. 

This fall Wayne and I have been putting some time into trying to get a start on the landscaping for the house.  The builders put in some plants and we got to keep some of the trees in front and back but we want to give the place personality and as we should be living in the house for quite a while we finally have a chance to put in flowers I have wanted to add for years.  The photo above is one of the 3 boxes of flowers and bulbs that my Mom sent to us.  Some of the plants are cuttings from plants that were my Grandma's and the rest are from Mom's garden which means there will be flowers from 3 generations of the women in our family.

A serious challenge to our yard is that the soil is clay and in the spring they had heavy machinery on it  grading, add the drought we had this summer and the soil is seriously compacted and hard to work so anywhere we wanted plants we had to dig it up and loosen it up before adding some real dirt to it.  This second photo shows one of the sections I had been working on.  The original plan wasn't near this ambitious but we just kept adding and adding......

This was the first area I dug up and planted.  It is in front of our trees in the front yard.  I planted mums, nandina (heavenly bamboo), pansies and violas as well as close to 300 bulbs.  We are hoping that everything will take off and we will have a nice area in the front .

We kept going back to Lowe's (we should buy stock we shop there so much) to get more dirt and plants etc for our growing fall project.  One advantage to this is that we manage to get plants that they were getting rid of and paying 25-75% less was very helpful and allowed us to buy more plants than we otherwise would of.  The 3 bushes above will hopefully grow into a sort of hedge between the neighbors side yard and ours.  It is a big empty space that the grass didn't really take well on so it can use something interesting.

This photo is partially here as a before photo since the builders put this area in, I added the Asiatic lilies and pansies to it but later you will see what we added.

Here is the area you saw in the 2nd photo once it has been worked more and plants and bulbs put in.  The only this you can see here above ground is the 2 bushes (more sale prices at Lowe's) but there are also many more bulbs under the ground just waiting for spring to come (at least we hope).

In part 2 I will include more photos and more of what we planted.