Spring Planting

My family - particularly J - indulged me over the weekend and let me focus on some major gardening projects in the yard. J and I woke up early and started to work while Lucy was asleep. After she woke up, we even figured out a system to keep her happy in the garden for another hour or so while I continued to clear out one of the garden beds. J worked mostly in the front of the yard and driveway, pulling out weeds that started to sprout among the gravel.

This is how you can contain an imp while you work in the garden before breakfast. We even set up a little Baby Einstein show for her to watch for a while - she loves the scenes with the animal puppets.

At the end of the day, we made some major improvements in clearing out the bed and planting flowers. There still are some weeds in the flower bed, but we pulled out all of the grass and were able to work around a lot of the California Poppy plants. As for the flowers we planted, I'll think of them as my Mother's Day gift from J, since he was so patient and helpful with the kids while we worked over the weekend.

Here are the annuals that we planted in the bed this year:

•  Cumbanita (Red) Geraniums
• Trailing red verbena
• Mounding viola (violets)
• African Marigold (Sam's pick - I don't care much for marigolds but I do like the bright color)
• Some orange zinnias
• French Marigold (Dwarf) - this was in the verbena six-pack. I'm not sure if the plant tag was added into the pack by mistake, but we planted it and will see what opens when it blooms.
• Purple African Daisy (J's pick).

I think that this May Night Salvia is going to be me favorite addition to this garden bed. I bought three of these, and they are a mounding perennial. I love the color and texture that they add to the space, and I think I will get a couple more this week. I hope they do well in this space.

We planted this Ruby's Tuesday Dianthus to replace the Bowles Mauve Wallflower that we planted three years ago.The wallflower plant grew to be immense, but I think it might have grown too large for its own good. A huge root system began to pop out of the ground and the whole plant died over the winter. Hopefully this dianthus will thrive in the same location. It is supposed to bloom throughout the spring, summer, and fall.

We still have a lot of work to do. My sister sent a landscaper to look at our yard last week (as a present to me), and I hope to have his team help out with the weeding around the back. We want to pull out the weeds and put down some landscape fabric to prevent any future growth.