This is the first spring in our new house, and the yard has a lot of existing flora but hasn’t been maintained in many years. It’s been fun seeing what pops out of the ground, but very time-consuming to clean things up. Early spring brought the nice surprise of crocuses, daffodils, snow drops, hyacinth, and tulips. Some of them were in logical old flower beds, but others sprung up in random spots all over the yard.
Tulips are kind of impossible to transplant once they are above ground, but whatever, I went for it anyway and only destroyed a few bulbs. There were plenty of errant tulips to learn with.
One of the bigger projects that I took on was cleaning up the old day-lily garden that the previous owner clearly spent so much love and time on. When we bought the house, it looked like this. Lots of dead piles of foliage, leaves and trash.
After giving the plants a really good thatching, weeding, and removing most of the debris, by mid April it was clear I had….a lot of day-lilies. And these are only the ones in the flower garden. There are also day-lilies around the shed, the property line, around some bushes, and in random spots in the yard. I easily have over 50 individual plants. It was also clear even at this phase that the plants were over crowded and needed splitting. But no time for that this year.
Whoa! The day-lilies got HUGE by mid-May. I have these enormous flower bushes basically everywhere now. One flower has already opened and it is orange. I have no idea if they’ll all be orange or not. Oh, we also started a vegetable garden in front of the flower garden.
Pictured are our sad seedlings that we had started indoors weeks ago. They weren’t in the sunniest of spots, so they’re kind of weak and small for this time of year. We transplanted them anyway, hoping some will take. I planted close together but alternated strong, weak, so hopefully they’ll take care of thinning themselves…..We are growing squash, watermelon, tomatoes, peppers and hot peppers. There are lots more seeds inside to plant, but they’re not in the ground yet. The chicken wire was already on the property in a big twisted pile, which is why it’s not so pretty but we decided to recycle it anyway. It still does its job of keeping critters out.
Lastly for now, let’s talk about the shed. Here it is in late winter. Nothing sprouted yet, the flowerbeds were pretty sad and full of dead things.
I spent a couple of days weeding, edging, tilling, and moving random yard flowers to the shed area. Then I mulched and lined with rocks.
When it was all done, it looked so much cleaner! Look how cute. By now, the day-lilies in this photo are WAY over grown. I had no idea they’d get so big. I will update you with more blooms as they bloom.
