Simple Pleasures: Garden before and after

When it comes to indoor plants, I have a black thumb. They die. Always. Without exception. So imagine my surprise to find out that I am MUCH better at keeping plants alive in our garden outside.

When we moved into our house last May, we inherited a mess of a garden. Observe.

One very overgrown mess plus lots of weeds

And don't forget lots of dirt

My parents came out for Fourth of July last year and my dad and I spent the weekend digging out the mess, laying weed mat, planting and mulching. The weed roots were so deep in some places that my dad had to employ a pick axe to get them out of the garden plot. We worked like crazy for three straights days. The results were worth it! We planted seven Hastas, a dozen Lilly plants, two Azalea bushes, four Hibiscus, and quite a few "Butterfly Mix" annuals. It was lovely, but a little scant because the first years of many of those plants leave them a little small.

This year the plants are already growing in larger, but still there's a lot of space and I don't want to have to plants lots of annuals every year. My plan is each year to add a few more perennials to the plot to reduce the amount of annual planting that will need to be done in the future. While the hibiscus we planted last year are technically perennials, I was informed by one of the plant nursery staff, only after I'd planted them, that Hibiscus often don't survive the winter this far north, it gets too cold for them. Sadly, this turned out to be the case for ours. That meant this year I had to add some additional perennials to the planting plan. Here are the results!