Front flower bed

While you may not think "landscape design" when you think of "crafts", this fits our mandate in that it's about seeing a project you want to do and be willing to try it out. (OK, I just made that up, so I need to confirm with the other Crafty Girl that this really is our mandate.)




For as long as I've owned my house, I've had that one little strip of a flower bed beside the driveway. I have tried various flowers in there, including some wildflowers started from seeds, but I usually opt for petunias since I don't really have a green thumb. I don't really know what it is, but I'm not that great with plants. I can kill a cactus, but I have a beautiful orchid in my office that keeps putting out flowers after two years. Petunias are always great option because they require almost zero care, flower all summer long, and are pretty frost-tolerant so they last well into September. This year I thought I'd expand that flower bed, add a couple curves, and include some different shapes and sizes of plants as well as some perennials.


I had a general idea in my head, did a couple measurements, sketched a plan on a piece of paper, and headed to Blue Grass Nursery for some plants and expert advice. I planned to have three wider sections with the perennials surrounded by petunias, so I purchased 48 petunias (various colours), 2 blue oat grass (Helicotrichon semperviens), 2 silver mound (Artemisia schmidtiana), and 1 'Blue Bomb' speedwell (Veronica). The picture at the top is all the plants. I also bought a bag of indoor/outdoor potting mix to add into the soil.

I used a couple of the plant pots and a garden hose to define the area I wanted to have as the flower bed, then cut the line with my shovel.

And then I started digging.... Oh my! I knew this was not going to be a small project, but I hadn't quite prepared myself for the scale of it. Part of the problem was that I wanted to save the dirt off the grass roots, so that just took time. I was also saving any earthworms I saw, but quickly realized that I have a very healthy population of worms in my lawn, so stopped worrying about keeping all of those. I also came across four different ant colonies while I was digging and it just made me realize how much is happening underground when we really only care about the green stuff on top.

Here you can see I've made some pretty good progress, though this was probably the worst time for me. I was about halfway done, so the excitement of starting was well gone and I wasn't even close to being able to get excited about being done. You can see the piles of grass on the driveway that I had to then load into a box in my vehicle to take over to the Yard Waste bin at the recycling depot. Then when I got there, I had to throw those clumps of grass one-by-one into the bin until I was able to lift the box to dump it. It would definitely have been easier if I had a truck that I could have thrown it all in to.







I didn't get too much further than what you see above before this was my view of incoming weather. So I took one more load of the grass clumps to the recycling depot and packed it in. Probably a good thing that the weather was looking bad because I needed a break. I was mindful of drinking water since I was in the sun all day (it's a south-facing driveway, so there's no part of the day that it's in shade for working), but I had a bit of a headache from being hot and no doubt from repeatedly bending over and standing up.







All those clouds didn't produce much rain, so I was able to go out later in the evening to do another hour-and-a-half of digging. But I still wasn't done! I had to get up early on Sunday morning to finish before I left for the day with my original plans of going out to my parents to work on my farm table.

Here's the flower bed all dug out. I'd guess it took me about 7 hours total to get it all done. My back and legs definitely were feeling it! Standing up and sitting down involved small moans for the next couple days.





Since I was gone all day Sunday, I was finally able to put the plants in the ground on Monday morning before work.

At lunch I was out to give them another dose of water when my very kind neighbours offered to take the last piles of grass clumps to the dump with the load they were taking anyway. You can see the driveway is all wet from me trying to spray the dirt back into the flower bed.

A week in and everything seems to be surviving. I just need one more dose of a really hard rain to clean the last bits of dirt off the driveway.

Blue Oat Grass

Silver Mound

'Blue bomb' Speedwell

It's been quite a change and I've had lots of compliments from the people going by walking their dogs, which has been really nice feedback that makes me think it really was worth all the effort :) 

I'll post updated pictures when things fill in a little more. 

~Lisa

P.S. I was experimenting with picture placement, so I really hope it shows up as I intended on your screen.

UPDATE: This is how it looked on August 30 at the end of summer.

The speedwell is a little lost in amongst the petunias. It didn't get as tall as I thought it would. I might move it and put something taller in that middle "bump" of the flower bed.