Almost Home Alone

Dugger and I are the only two at home. The other three are at hair appointments. With a few minutes of time on my hands, I thought I'd finish off our gardening blog. Over the Memorial Day Weekend we rented a tiller for Saturday morning. The only plants we had in the garden were a boxwood bush and about seven hostas. I dug up the hostas plants, since we wanted to keep them and spread them along the border of the garden. The boxwood was in a location that wouldn't get tilled so I didn't need to remove it.

The ground is rock hard because of the type of soil we have and the fact that the dog runs through the garden beating down a rock hard path. The tiller turned out to be a monster. I believe the tiller was a front-end tiller (didn't know there were different kinds of tillers). The pictures from the previous blog show the soil before we began tiller and after I dug out the hostas. Doug and I had to take turns tilling the soil because the tiller was so hard to control and manipulate. Doug and I finally got into a rhythm and learned how to get the most tilled soil out of the tiller. I have to admit that I scraped the side of the house two times.






Once we finished with the garden we moved the tiller to the vegetable garden area and tilled that soil. Now that soil is much softer and very good soil for planting. The problem here was that with such a powerful tiller we would get it stuck in the soil some and have to pull it out from the soft rows. Here is the pre-tiller vegetable garden shot.


After all this work we returned the tiller. Later in the day I laid out landscaping material and placed the hostas in their new location. Doug and I wanted large stepping stones as a way to keep Amber, the dog, out of the plants but still allow her access to the garden (that she would get into anyway).

We went to several home improvement stores and to a couple of nursery's looking for large and natural stepping stones. We had no luck. One of my friend's brother is a landscaper (his company did our front yard) so I called him in the hopes that he would have some stones in stock. We also headed out to his building, hoping that he or his co-owner would be there. Well the road to their place was blocked off because of road construction. As we turned around we we drove right by another nursery in town. One side of the street has the nursery with the typical garden plants and across the street they have their large trees, blocks, rocks, and stones. We spied what looked like potential stepping stones and pulled in to the nursery. We climbed on the stack of stones, dug through them, and picked the perfect ones. Three hundred pounds later we has some beautiful stones. One of them Doug had to have because it looks like the state of GA. See for yourself.


This wrapped up our Saturday. On Sunday we headed back to the nursery and bought more stones and a Japanese Maple. Using Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophy of path design, we placed out stones along the well worn path that Amber had created. Keeping her established route intact. Hopefully this will ensure that she will stay on the path. Our garden was coming along.
Sunday's work.


On Monday feeling much less sore we bought some plants to begin filling our garden. We also bought tomatoes, bell peppers, sunflowers, and cucumber seeds for the vegetable garden. T-man has tried to grow sunflowers in the past and not had any success. We think that the rabbits kept eating them. With Amber we think that the rabbits will not venture into the yard.


The crew is back so I'll wrap up the garden story later.