Lovely days like today don’t come often enough. It was warm, pleasant, and I had time to both tinker around online and dink around outside sticking plants in to my two whiskey-barrel containers.
David drilled a whole in the one barrel that didn’t drain properly, and now it’s useable and not a yucky object that looks and smells like a swamp. I added a couple of handfuls of rock mulch to keep the drainage hole clear. Tore out some more of the prickly bush that insists on growing up through the roots of the one bushy pine shrub, and even got some mulch down. It’s kind of a bright brick-red color, this mulch, but what can you say when they were practically giving it away at Lowe’s?
I’d left the planting of container and bedding plants for a week, and have to salvage one set of annual plants – they have to be babied for a bit to be convinced that they’re not dead yet. Everything else made it through the week, and I have one small bed (the kitty garden) to dig out tomorrow afternoon. The landscape guys whacked all of my perennial plants down to the ground, and some made it through the winter, and some didn’t.
Later on, our friend Jill came over for a nice visit and dinner at Bahama Breeze, so we could get caught up on everything and decry our inability to make firm plans to get together more frequently before now. We ended up hosing off the plastic patio chairs so we could sit “out” after returning from dinner, and didn’t feel like crawling around in the rafters of the garage getting all the “good” chair cushions down. It may not have been classic outdoor entertaining, but it was outdoors and we were highly entertained by each other, so there.
Martha Stewart I am not, so although the effect will eventually be pleasing, the front of the house still has a scruffy, not-done-yet character to the containers and bedding plants. At least last year’s 3 clematis plants made it through, no thanks to me, and they’re thriving for now.
I may even get the one tomato plant in the ground tomorrow – I’ve never grown vegetables before, and wanted to start with something simple. We’ll see how this goes.
