Flower Power: Garden Makeover

Spring is here!!!! Woooo Hooooooo!!!! Although, someone needs to tell the snow that it's time to stop falling. It has snowed nearly every day last week, including the first two days of spring. But that's not "blanketing" my spring mood.

I have a project. A fun project. And I'm SO excited!! I'm going to overhaul our poor excuse of a flowerbed. Even though I was feeling all gung-ho for a full blown property renovation for all of our 1.5 acres, I've decided to start small and just do the front, existing flowerbeds (well, and a little behind the house too...but we'll discuss that later).

Here are some "before" pictures (taken last May):

Above: To the right of the front door, and first thing you see when you come to our house. B-O-R-I-N-G!

Below: To the left of the front door. There really are windows behind the lilac bushes. This area is not too bad but needs some TLC.

When we moved into this house nearly 3 years ago it had a nice sized flowerbed along the front of the house. But it's a rock bed and I just can't like it.

It is taking me 3 years to fix it because the first summer was devoted to getting the house - and our emotions - settled (we moved here the end of May, right after saying good-bye to Stan's mom). The second year I was big prego and bending over a flowerbed was about #97 on my top 10 list of fun things to do. The third year I had my hands full with child #4, who did NOT like sitting in the grass and watching...so I did a few flowers in terra cotta pots to appease myself. So here we are, actually approaching our 4th summer in this house.

I wont bore you with the details now, but I'll keep posting about the progress as we go along. Although I must say that one item on the list is to get rid of those evergreen trees that look like earmuffs on the house (See first picture).

I'm new to this whole gardening thing and have killed every single house plant I've ever tried to keep. Every. Single. One. (I've killed an ivy for crying out loud! That's nearly impossible!) So this should be quite entertaining for you.

I chose to work with a flowerbed instead of a vegetable garden because...well...this is just more exciting for me. I mean, I dont really like vegetables anyway and I'd feel more pressure for them to succeed, and then there's the work of putting them up once they've grown. That and I just want something fun and not something practical or functional. My whole life is practical and functional...lets have some fun.

So I've done a little homework and looked into this crazy Montana micro-climate insanity to see what might actually grow here. I chose my color scheme and some (hopefully) easy to grow plants that are also deer and rabbit resistant so I dont get discouraged. I know. Nothing is fool-proof. Especially for this fool!

So we're supposed to check out the color wheel and find harmonizing colors to plant in our garden. Colors like red, yellow and orange are hot and energizing, while blue, purple and green are more soothing. Well...I'm going a little against the grain and I decided to go with red, yellow, and purple! I mean...red and yellow go together, purple and yellow go together, red and purple go together...so what's the big deal? I think it will be great!

I went to Lowe's and picked out some supplies to get started. I'm going to start some seeds inside so that they will be ready to plant in May. Most of what I got are perennials (for any novices like me...that means they come back each year)

Anyway, here is what I have so far:





Pretty, huh? This is just the tip of the iceberg. These will probably be all that I get for now and when it's time to plant I'll buy some plants (mostly annuals...only grow one season) from a nursery to add to my collection.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoy our garden makeover. Being new to this I'm sure I'll make some pretty dumb mistakes along the way, but ya gotta start somewhere, right?

Next step:
Plant seeds in that handy dandy self watering greenhouse that you see in the picture and get them growing. Also, clear out those ugly rocks and bring in the mulch!