MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

You may recall from a few days ago that a major gardening undertaking was in progress at our house.  The next day, Monday, we had delivered 10 cubic yards of a mixture of mulch, fertilizer and compost guaranteed to grow anything that had roots.  I, of course, being the doomsayer, immediately thought of weeds.  But at least they'll be super easy to pull out of this mixture.  My workers came back after their regular jobs Monday evening and loaded all this into the flower bed.  In the end, it was almost one foot deep, but with the rain coming that night and next day, and settling in general, it was going to be about 6" deep in a month or so.  And turn into rich soil by next year.

I went out to one of the local nurseries to buy some colorful spring flowering plants.  Here are my choices:

You will also see a huge roll of batting on the right side of my SUV.  Doesn't everyone carry one of these, just in case she has a quilting attack?  No?  Well, I have been carrying this baby around for two weeks and showing up at all my guild functions so that people can get the batting they need to finish their quilts.  This is part of my job as Outreach Chairperson for the guild.  However, I'm done for now.  I have some things I have to do over the next two weeks, so the batting has been safely restored to its resting place in my studio.

The red flowers are petunias.  There's a fuschia colored azalea in there, several ageratum (blue feathery tufts), blue fescue (blue-green grassy plant), golden orangey iris, and a luscious light and dark purple streaked day lily.  There's also a spreading bushy plant that's blue, which I think is called a delphinium, but I lost the tag, so I'm not sure.  I wanted phlox, which have been sold out for awhile I'm discovering, but I found a wild patch along the road out here in the countryside, and I plan to sneak up on it when it's least expecting me and dig some of it up!

Although this looks a little sparse right now, as the season wears on, the plants will spread out a little and fill their spaces.  And I can always add some pansies, which bloom forever.  The last thing I'm going to add is a white dogwood in this garden, and two whites and one red in the garden near the entrance to the driveway.

Tomorrow the workers are supposed to come back to dig up some VERY prolific spreading tea roses from a more defined garden, which they overran last year and had to be cut back severely, and plant them along the steep bank on one side of my driveway.  They bloom into the fall -- I think the last time I saw any blooms last year was in November! -- and will be both lovely to look at and useful as soil stabilizers on that bank.