Manual Labor

We had a weekend full of yard work – lots of yard work – and all that manual labor has made me sore and tired!  But, I’m glad we got so much good work done and our yard is starting to look like spring!  Of course, none of it would have been possible without GJ’s help!  I just love how she somehow manages to be in town on a beautiful April/May weekend each year so I can rope her into helping us in the yard!  🙂

First, I got my planters in the backyard all fixed up…no thanks to my “helper”.

He was really good at throwing out the dirt I put into the pot!

But, how can you be mad when he’s this cute?!

Along with my second helper, we planted sweet basil, purple basil, rosemary, 3 kinds of tomatoes (sweet cherry, patio and some random variety from the grocery store) and a blueberry plant!

Hooray for mini gardens!

and for my stroooong helpers!

This is my first year trying a blueberry plant so we’ll see.  Spencer was bound and determined to kill it before it even had a chance…

Hopefully he’ll learn to leave it alone!…and learn to stop throwing dirt all over himself!  🙂

But, he did learn this weekend to leave his hat on for a bit so that’s good!

I also got smart this year and just got a pre-mixed planter basket to put in my square planters…

Easy peasy!

My mom bleached our front steps and made me realize that I didn’t know just how dirty they were!  So much better now!

My mom and I also sprayed Round Up in all the beds – we used a lot Round Up to kill a lot of weeds!  Robert trimmed all the boxwoods and got them looking good.  We also decided we needed to pull up a few of the spirea bushes we had in front because they weren’t going to come back.  I took my helpers to Home Depot (which Maxwell has declared his favorite store – I’m sure the orange everything doesn’t hurt!) and picked out something to replace them with.  My helpers decided on these Jasmine plants…

Good choice.  Getting the 3 dead spirea out of the ground was easy – getting out the 2 alive ones that I also needed to move was a different story!  I was digging hard with that shovel and wielding that ax – thank goodness I work out!  With a little sweat, we got the old plants out and the new plants in and I think they’re going to do great in that spot.

On Sunday I started planting our new annuals.  Maxwell spotted these orange zinnias and these little orange pine cone looking flowers called celosia and that was that.  We had to have those for the yard.  I got the ones by the street planted as well as some in front of our crape myrtle.

He keeps calling them “my orange flowers”.  Pretty cute.  I’ll tackle the ones by the front steps next.

It was frankly an exhausting weekend but a good exhausting.  Never, ever did I think I would enjoy yard work but the satisfaction you get from a job well done is great!  Next weekend?  Mulch!  Isn’t home ownership fun?!  🙂

For my records – I used 8 flats of 8 for the front bed and in front of the crape myrtle. Pansies in the fall, this year a mixture of zinnias and celosia in the front. I planted begonias by the front steps and used 5 flats of 10 for the two beds. I did not plant anything by the back of the parking pad. We got 5.5 yards of mulch delivered from Cahaba Heights Hardware.