I know all you ladies have a team of gardeners that work for you and you don’t ever have to get your hands dirty but for the rest of us mere mortals, we have the joy of getting outside and getting down in the dirt! Ha ha
We built our home about ten years ago and with that I was left with a big dirt pile all around my house! Now I’m not native to this area (the southeast) and I had no idea what grows well here and what does NOT. All I did know was that I didn’t want a
“Pepto-Bismol Yard”!!!
You know……. when you drive by a house and there’s a tree plopped here and a bush plopped there, having no rhyme or reason to the landscape.
Here’s what I had going for me…… I was young (in my mid twenties), eager to learn, willing to work, and time on my hands.
Here’s what I didn’t have going for me…… Money, money, oh and more money!
So here’s how my sneaky little mind works…………..
I commissioned a landscape architect to design a blue print for around the perimeter of the house. Yes, it was a bit of an investment but I have saved so much money in the long run. The architect sent along a quote for just the plants…. NOT including labor……for $36,000! Yeah…okay…. thanks but I will be heading in a different direction.
So my next step…..
I took a Master Gardener course! Yep, I’m a Master Gardener. Don’t get to excited, I learned just enough to plant my own landscape beds and how to keep them alive! I couldn’t design a landscape bed or identify random weeds in your yard to save my life. {I also took this course to show my homeschool kiddos that you always need to keep a “love” of learning and that learning never stops. They loved to see their mom studying for a test!}
I wish I had more photos to show you, but I had a major malfunction with my external hard drive last fall and lost all my photographs but a few photographs. Here are a few that I found from last spring.
When it came time to buying the plants, I bought them really small. The larger the tree the more expensive! These three Crape Myrtle’s, in the photo above, looked like bushes for years!
My Japanese's Maple tree. This is the one plant that I spent a fortune on but was so worth it! I justified the cost from all the money that I saved in other places in the landscaping.
I doubled my money on these bushes pictured above, when I bought the gallon size (instead of the small quart size) and divide them into two plants! In one growing season they were back to the original gallon size container!
The architect even designed a lighting scheme. It’s really beautiful all lit up at night. And it doesn’t look like a airport runway either!!! (Runway lighting always goes with Pepto-Bismol landscaping)
Remember last week I mentioned my unpleasant dilemma with our septic system?
Here is where I currently have a big hole. We moved the Crape Myrtle (the one that finally looks like a tree after many years), and I’m praying that it survives! The bushes, to the right of the tree, we lost in the drought we had last summer. Actually it’s not the dry hot summers that kill a plant, but a dry season followed by a wet season (like the one we just had). See…. in a hot dry season, the tiny root hairs die and the large tap root goes deeper in the ground in search of moisture. Which when the onset of a wet season comes combined with the lack of tiny root hairs, the plant will die. Okay…. maybe I did learn a thing or two in my Master Gardner class. he he
