Renovatin'

Earlier this year, back in the spring (today's the first day of summer! Yay!), I embarked on a huge project wherein I turned the weedy hill in front of the house into a terraced rock garden of sorts. At least, I built it out of rocks - I didn't really intend for it to be a rock garden. It's just that, well, my plants are still so teeny that all you see is rocks.

It was a heroic amount of work, if I do say so myself. Next year maybe I'll finish it. I had to rip up all the existing groundcover (patchy grass and creeping jenny), sort it out, banging all of the good dirt off and saving all of the worms, dump the tangled discarded root masses, then build it into levelled areas supported by rock walls. Single-handedly, might I add (my man was on a fishing trip). I collected the rocks off of our road; every time they grade the road in my neighborhood, they churn up a veritable gravel pit of rocks of all different sizes, so they were always handy.

For purposes of bragging, and to tell you the kind of back story to any progress reports I might want to make on the state of my perennial gardens in the future, here are the BEFORE pictures:





Note the scruffy grass and the beginnings of some dirt-churning up top, which I started last fall but ran out of steam too quickly to complete. I have an old perennial garden at the top, which you can't see much of, because I actually moved all of the good perennials out of that garden and into a nursing bed for all of last season. I moved them all back into more suitable spots (high in back low in front!) after finishing the project this year.

OK now (drumroll please!) here are the AFTER shots:





It doesn't hurt that the grass is so green in the latter set, mainly because so much time had passed between the two...

And now I'm looking at those photos and thinking "look at my baby garden!" in a sentimental way, because it sure has filled in since then. That's the best thing about photos - you can really tell how things have progressed. Maybe in another 2 weeks I'll post a photo of what it looks like now. Those pictures were taken in mid-May!

And, in closing, I want to chat a bit about the glories of straw. I bought two bales of straw for the veggie garden this past weekend (I know I know, I learned the hard way, I only needed one), and mounded it up between all of my babies. Well the garden sure looks a lot tidier now! Once the plants get bigger and the patch appears less, well, totally straw-coloured, it'll really look like a little farm in there. Plus, the cats love to roll around in it, which I can't decide is a good or a bad thing.