Hosta La Vista Baby

Last Sunday was our day of rest.  No demo, no dust, no mess.  Well, no not really.  We did do a little insulation installation and sheet rock hanging.  But we had to take a bit of a fresh air break.  It was way too gorgeous outside not to spend a significant amount of time en plein air.  What better way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon than gardening?  And I had just the spot in mind to work on.  This old garden area in the back yard, beside the basement door:

It needed some help.  I wasted no time ripping up the bricks and going to town. After I moved all the bricks to the basement, I dug up the sod moving it to the lawn-ish area behind the shed, and mixed in some potting soil with the old dirt.

I layered on some gardening fabric and then planted a trio of peonies in the space.

Two of the peonies I had picked up during mother’s day weekend while I was up in the county with my mom.  I didn’t know where I wanted to plant them at the time but I absolutely adore peonies and knew they had to come home with me.  Since they needed a decent amount of sun, my location choices were limited in our shady yard.  So I picked up a third peony at Lowes to balance out the two I already had and planted them all.

And just a week later one of the peonies has already bloomed!  Yippee!

So much beauty.  But sadly, if you step back just a few feet, it looks more like this:

Those are the stairs that go down to the basement work shop.  The old stairs washed away in the springtime flood so Colby has been in the process of digging up the old stairs and laying something more solid and sturdy.  Once he finishes up the stairs, I’m thinking of planting some creeping flox along the edge of the peony garden with the hopes that they’ll cascade down that cement wall.

I also spent a little time pruning up the azalea which exploded with blooms this year!

I’m trying to get the azalea to grow more upwards instead of outwards into the neighbor’s driveway.  After trimming up the plant, I couldn’t bear to just toss the blooming branches into the compost pile so they came inside and I filled just about every vase in our house with azalea blooms.  My favorite bloom collection is over the kitchen sink.

I used some cheap, IKEA vases from about five years back and filled them with the branches.

And to conclude this evening’s gardening themed post, I also spent some time planting some hostas that I picked up from Lowes for about $5 each.

I bought them to replace a trio of hostas that I thought were dead.  I had planted said hostas last spring along the window side of the shed.  And while the neighbors’ hostas were all springing up, mine were still MIA.  Hence the new hostas.  But in between the time I brought home the hostas and went to plant them, the shed hostas popped up.  So I found a new spot for the new hostas.

They’re in the nook where my hammock lives.

They’re there, trust me.  The hostas are just really small right now.  Oh…and did you notice how luscious the lawn is looking these days?!  That’s the same area where we worked on the lawn this spring, leveling and re-seeding the whole thing.

Our yard is still a complete mess, but we’re slowly but surely inching towards something that we can be proud of.

Pssst….Did you notice the planters in the background of the hostas-in-pots picture?  Those are our wedding flowers popping up!  Yippee!  We haven’t killed them yet!

Psssssst…Happy Memorial Day Weekend everyone!  Anything awesome, fun and exciting planned?  BBQs with the family?