I am a gardening ROCK STAR!

Or so I think anyway!!

I was bitten by the gardening bug this morning, so without wasting any time I was outside checking out the front garden. It was OK, but lots of blank spaces, some brown dying shrub bits, and a very bug eaten lily that I'm not sure will ever produce an actual flower (lilies here are attacked by these nasty little red beetle things that are impossible to get rid of).

Before:

The lawn is still pretty rough as DBF thatched and fertilized it and filled in some dead spots with topsoil and grass seed before he went away, and that has yet to take and start growing in. Hopefully it will catch on this week.

So I decided to put edging around the pre-existing garden, so that when we can mow the lawn, I can trim around the edges and make it look all even and pristine. I've never done edging before, but how hard could it be? haha. Actually not hard since the perimeter of the garden was already there....I just had to dig it out with the shovel, then push it in and pat all the dirt back into place. I watered it down and that worked like a charm. Now, if only I could actually get in there with the weedwacker and trim that grass.... soon!!

During:

Then I wanted to fill it in with some more flowers, greenery....definitely perennials so I don't have to do it again next year....plus perennials tend to really fill out and leaf up so it should be quite a lush garden within a month or so. So I wandered through a few garden centres, not really knowing what I was looking for....and eventually walked out with:

- 3 hosta
- 1 rudbeckia
- 2 new leafy shrubs....1 ___ and 1___
- and 13 little 99cent fillers.... 8 ___ because they are a beautiful blue and grow low, and 5 others that will grow tall and colorful and attract butterflies (I planted the tags with the plants so I would know what they are, so I'll have to fill that in later...haha)

After:

I had no idea what I was doing with any of it until I got the edging in and started placing stuff out. Turns out I bought pretty much exactly enough stuff. Could've done with maybe one more hosta (or something similar size) but I'll wait and see how things shape up once they start growing. I put the 8 low, blue ones spaced out along the front edge, so those should do really well.....and put the taller ones in a couple of places throughout, towards the rear. Turns out it was good that I bought the two shrubs (gotta love buy one, get one half price!) because I found perfect homes for them.

I then finally put out my solar lanterns. I love them....so cute!! And they light up blue LED at night.

The existing round shrubs could look better, but I really don't know much about shrubbery so I'm not too sure what to do there. Mainly I'm just hoping everything else will fill in around them and you won't see the dead, brown underbellies anymore.

I'm pretty stoked about the whole thing and can't wait to see how it looks when the lawn gets up to speed and everything starts to grow and blossom. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!