We Have a Garden

This past weekend I decided to add a little curb appeal to the house. The garden has been neglected for three years so a huge project was the order of the day. Here's a picture of what I had in front of me:

I woke up on Saturday morning at 7 a.m. and creeped out of bed. I didn't want to wake my beautiful bride so I walked on my tippy toes. I hit the local Home Depot early so I would miss the crowds. I was like a kid in a candy store. There was mulch, borders, and manure.........OH MY!!!!!! I also picked up a dumping cart, rake, and a hoe. I was set and ready to go.

I took a hold of my hoe and hoed like I've never hoed before. I got the trench built and laid 90 (9 lb each) cement blocks in place. I removed some of the sickly looking bushes that were on their last leg. After all that, the garden looked really clean and I couldn't wait to lay down the manure and mulch. Unfortunately I had one problem - ROCKS!

For some reason the builder of our house thought that it would be neato to place a ton of rocks in the garden. Leslie and I are not into the rock garden look so I needed to get rid of them before I could lay down the mulch. I swear that there were 25 buckets full of rocks in that soil. It was bad enough that they were on the surface, but they were also rocks buried in the soil. Our next door neighbor wanted the rocks so I poured them out for her next to her garden. By the time I took the following picture, she had made a huge dent in the pile.

It took hours to get them all out. I even had 4 little helpers from next door to help dig them out. Those kids thought it was the coolest thing to help me. It's amazing how things we think are work are considered fun by little kids. One said it was better than easter egg hunting. Whenever a large rock was uncovered the girls would shreik with glee like it was Christmas morning. There is a lesson we can learn from that. How we experience life is all about our attitude.

Once we cleared all the rocks, I laid down the organic material (ok, manure) and then the mulch. The sun was starting to set and it was finally done. Tell me what you think of the new look:

We Have a Garden

http://thelatebloomersblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/we-have-garden.html