Splish Splash Gardening

After months of hemming and hawing - reality check, it was at most two months - plants for the front garden have been selected, placed and planted. It was a cloudy, raining morning which was perfect for transplanting.

After facilitating the munchkins cooking the entire family a breakfast of champions, which was pancakes of course, Wifey and I headed out to the garden. This is where what we started with at 9am.

And here, just behind the iris and day lillies you can spy upon the mock orange that was planted earlier this month.

We placed out the plants and got to work. We had five shrubs to plant - 3 emerald gaiety euonymus, 1 blue danube juniper and 1 royal purple smokebush.

Wifey took the lead on digging the holes, while I took the lead on transplanting the shrubs and weeding elsewhere in the garden. It was running quickly and efficiently, until we hit hole number three. This hole has been termed the hole from hell. We've got rocky, clay soil, and the compaction near the foundation from the fall waterproofing isn't joyous to work in.

I think it took Wifey about 10-15 minutes to dig this much out. Note how she's standing with her full weight on the shovel and nothing is moving.

When we got to the fifth, and final hole, Wifey smelled gas. Well, in actuality, we'd been smelling gas upon occasion at the side of the house since last November. That's when the yahoos who were waterproofing the foundation broke the gas line (and they'd even had a locate done) and we came home to a house with no heat since no one bothered to call us to let us know about the snafu. Because of the rain, we were able to see the air bubbles escaping from the tiny gas leak at the connection joint.

I'm thankful that no one was ever hurt. I'm also thankful that the leak was before the meter and we haven't been paying for all that wasted gas!

The lady with the gas company was quite comical. She asked Wifey how long she'd been smelling gas for. When Wifey told her since last fall, the customer service representative responded, "Um, Ma'am, next time you smell gas you should call us RIGHT AWAY."

So we kept on planting until the gas company showed up.

Here I am measuring up the purple smokebush. I also noticed that you can see my underwear in this photo. I've always been a bit disdainful of people who bend over and reveal their underwear. Who knew that all of this time, I had been one of those people.

Relationships are about compromise, and apparently, gardens are too. Wifey had really wanted a juniper, and so I worked a blue danube juniper into the mix. I had really wanted a smokebush, and Wifey wanted to get rid of a tree that had been knocked by the bobcat during fall construction.

You can see it was a win-win situation.

And finally, the planting was done.

I really enjoy the pairing of the blues and burgundy colours. During the plant selection process, the golden barberry lost out to the euonymus. There's still a touch of the golden yellow tones through the mock orange. I cannot wait to see what it looks like next year when it fills out and I can place some more plantings in front.

Next, we laid down some newspaper and a couple inches of mulch. This should hopefully keep some of the weeds down and assist in our wild violet eradication project.