Saturday was a blustery and cold day for yard work, but we gave it a valiant effort. We got a load of compost dumped on the garden to use in back filling trees and working into planting areas. It is rich and dark... and guess where from? Mink manure! If you live in Lehi you are all too familiar with the mink farm smell that permeates the air through the summer... but it actually makes for good compost and doesn't even smell.
We started with the flower bed closest to the front door. It needed to be raised and graded to slope away from the house to drain properly, so we dumped a bunch of compost on and turned it in with a shovel. Hopefully it will improve the rocky, clay dominant, compacted soil just a little bit!
Mike dug a hole for our first and only tree to be planted thus far (Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar). He made me laugh... he has an engineer's brain for sure. He measured the pot and set out to dig an efficient hole exactly that size. When I realized what he was up to I had to explain that gardeners do things differently... the hole needs to be double the height and width of the root ball to allow for growth! He was bummed and wants to buy a pick axe.
I jumped the gun a little and planted some perennials (bleeding hearts and hosta) even though we don't have sprinklers in yet. I'll take a little hand-watering over barrenness.Coming up soon I am going to tell you about some great shade plants that I hope to find for this North-facing bed!
looks so pretty already! That is funny about mike... Landon and i were talking about that on the way home actually so it makes me laugh. We talked about how long it probably took him to dig a perfect hole and sure enough... we were right! hahaha.
ReplyDeleteE is such a cute little nugget in these pictures helping Dad dig. I love it!
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