All weekend I wandered around in this sort of happiness-haze, wearing garden gloves and scooping dirt and saying things to Kendrick like “Who KNEW? I mean really…who knew?!” And he was sort of confused by my need to announce (over and over) how amazed I was by the fact that I was enjoying something that was way, way outside the realm of anything I would have ever thought I’d enjoy…but seriously.
WHO KNEW?
I never in a million years understood why people liked gardening. I was like, “OK…so you spend all weekend hunched over on your hands and knees digging in the dirt, probably encountering things like insects, and at the end you get…something that you could probably just go pick up over at CVS? Cool, guys.”
But it’s so satisfying. And the results are so gorgeous. And there’s something really incredible about standing back, looking at your yard which was once one thing and is now another thing entirely, and thinking I did that.
Anyway, this sauce ladle is what I chose to use as my spade, if that gives you any sense of the starting point we were working from in terms of gardening know-how. (I picked up an actual spade on Sunday afternoon, so we’re good now.)
The first steps, of course, were the boring (or at least not immediately-gratifying) ones: sprinkling grass seeds on the bare spots, pulling out dead bushes, mulching the flowerbed, planting lavender seeds along the border, et cetera.
But next came the fun stuff: I picked up a zillion gorgeous pots in the garden section of T.J. Maxx (every pot pictured here except for those big terracotta ones is from the store), bought soil, and got to planting.
I planted large lilac bushes surrounded by two varieties of salvia…
Put in a rosebush that immediately wounded me and made me think twice about owning a rosebush…
Moved our fire pit (the one I ordered off of eBay and then forgot about until a fire pit arrived on my doorstep) and rocker to the center of the garden, and then accented it with a ceramic frog and yet more salvia (my next plan is to get those weeds out – obviously – and then do a pretty two-tone thing with the gravel)…
And then celebrated. Because that was AWESOME.
P.S. Every plant you see here is also accessorized with a deer-repellent station. We’ll see how that goes (fingers crossed).
On me: T-shirt and shorts via T.J. Maxx; necklace c/o Melinda Maria.
