A Tale of Two Gardens

What a perfect weekend, with nothing to do except be.  It's hard to quiet the never-ending to do list in my mind, but at least for the weekend, there were no urgent work needs shouting over the quiet ding of the at-home to-do's.

The weather is warm, almost hot. The last frost happened the night before Mother's Day, which was May 12. We spent the week or two before that shopping for plants.  I took my list of perennials that I put together during snowy weather naptimes, and just went for it and starting buying. Of course, Mike didn't need much; he had a nice mini-nursery of his own of vegetables he started from seed:

So here is the story of the making of our two gardens in our new home. 

Perennial Flower Bed

Laying out the border of the future garden

Drawing out the border with rope

setting out the plants

and they're planted

ta da

 

Now, I know you can't see that much in these pictures, but I'm hopeful there will be lots to show in future photos. I used my Ever Blooming Flower Garden book for inspiration and lists of plants. The author, Lee Schneller, has a glossary of perennial plants that do well in densely planted beds, as well as fairly exact blooming times, to help you design a garden that will always look good. Anyone who has planted perennials knows how hard that is to do. I didn't follow the plans too strictly, just kind of breezed through and tried to get a few things from different bloom times, but to be honest, I really ran out of space for some of the fall-bloomers that weren't in garden centers yet, so I see lots of revisions in the future!

What did I plant? Siberian and bearded irises, peonies, allium, coral bells, penstemon 'Husker Red,' columbines, lavendar, catmint, pincushion flower, dianthus, delphiniums, coneflowers, johnny jump-ups, and a couple other things I forgot the names of!

Vegetable Garden

It's tilled

the fence is up

view from the front

and we're planted

Mike hired someone to till the garden, then built a fence with tree branch posts from trees he cut down in our yard, and used deer fencing for the fence. I'd list everything he's planted, but there's just too much; it'd be quicker to list what he hasn't! 

Here are a few other pictures from around the garden: 

some fruit trees

my hanging basket

crabapple

Mike couldn't get her to smile, despite her genuine enthusiasm to go on a Saturday afternoon walk

It really was an amazing weekend, with golden sunshine and singing birds and little cottonwood puffs floating through the air, flowering trees in full bloom everywhere, and a Sunday evening thunderstorm followed by singing nighttime frogs. But interestingly, the aftertaste of winter lingers just a little in my mind, and somehow it's hard to completely trust this is real. In a similar way, I'm still adjusting to having almost EVERY weekend off from work after years of working too many hours, and it's hard to trust that that is real as well. But I will enjoy spending the next few weeks savoring the warmth and freedom learning to believe it!