Gardening is a part of our daily routine here at Rock Father HQ. While we’ve got a lot of basic maintenance-type stuff to do, we occasionally fall into an oddball project, and last month we had one. The removal of The Bush of Doom… and the rebirth of the area from which it came.
On the corner of our deck was a gigantic evergreen – a piece than my wife never liked, and one that I’d struggled to keep trimmed since we moved here a few years back. It was so large that it shaded out some grass, completely blocked our shed from the view of the house, and was a haven for mosquitos (along with who-knows-what underneath it). This past winter, the weight of a heavy snow managed to split the thing in three spots, effectively sealing it’s doom. Problem is, I couldn’t get any of the 4,000+ local tree establishments to come cut the thing down (apparently they’re not big on emails or phone calls). Eventually, I finally borrowed a clippers from a neighbor and hacked the whole thing down myself – manually – on June 26. My almost-four-year-old was more than happy to help carry off the pieces…
The stump could still use some work, but I did what I could. Now we were left with a pretty large area that needed some sprucing up – especially since the rest of the deck is surrounded with perennials that we’ve been nurturing over the years.
Rather than go 100% the perennial route, I decided to take a different approach, setting up this corner as a “seasonal feature” – a focal point of the yard that the girls and I can have some fun with. So, on June 30, Addie and I made a trip to Home Depot and grabbed some Scott’s Earthgro Mulch, some Miracle-Gro Garden Soil, and a small assortment of Sunflowers and Vigoro Summer Survivors. Some much-needed color to liven up the now-barren corner.
But some prep would be needed…
We stripped everything and mixed the existing soil and decaying mulch together with the Miracle-Gro Garden Soil to create a new, nutrient-rich base for our new flowers. Addie couldn’t resist plopping herself into the fresh dirt, so she played “construction site” for a little bit, and then helped pick out where the new flowers would eventually go. You can see how things progressed below…
Not content with just setting this up for “the now,” Addie and I did one other step between the planting of the flowers and the placement of the mulch. We had some Hollyhock’s that we’d grown from seed for a couple of years, and for whatever reason, they never came back this year. Thinking ahead, we planted some Hollyhock seeds in here (close to the deck) in the hopes that we’ll have some of those nice, tall flowers there starting next year. But for this Fall, we planted some Corn as an ornamental in strategic locations. If all goes as planned, we’ll be making this area into a Fall Feature this year, complete with Pumpkins, Gourds, Straw Bales, etc. And what better backdrop than some honest-to-goodness Corn? We’ve grown it in the garden before, but never for decoration. This is what it looked like a week ago…
I’ll keep you updated on what it looks like as we move closer to Fall. Give me a follow on Instagram (new!) or a like on Facebook to keep up!
Are you doing any fun Garden projects this summer?
