A Busy Weekend

What a busy weekend I had for a 6 month preggo. On Friday afternoon I weeded the front flower beds. They look awful because of the lack of flowers, deer-eaten shrubs, and dying bulbs, but at least they're weed free now. Our goal is to pull out or trim down the remaining mature shrubs and then shrink the size of the beds by planting grass. The beds are just so big that they're unmanageable.

On Saturday morning before a thunderstorm I quickly pruned the "azalea hedge" on the right side of the front door (can be seen in the pictures in this post). It's actually 3 very large azaleas that had been pruned into a hedge. I very much prefer naturally bushy azaleas so I hacked the things back like crazy. D had hacked the back of the "hedge" last summer to get it off the house, and there's some nice new growth from that. So, the bushes will be ugly all summer, but by next spring they should be looking good (and much more in proportion to the size of the other plantings).

On Sunday D and I did some more gardening. He pulled out all of the deer-eaten euonymous from around the lamp post. It looked really bad, and last year we had considered pulling it out, but never got to it. The deer made the decision to get rid of it very easy. Below are some pictures of just how bad it looked.

Now, since the front of our house is looking like such a mess (it's a work in progress), I decided that we needed at least one part of it to look good, so I decided to do a little bed around the lamp post. At the nursery I choose a Sarah Bernhardt pink peony, a mountain sage (perennial salvia), a coreopsis 'moonbeam', and a creeping bellflower (campenula birch hybrid). I was going to get a clematis to climb the lamp post, but couldn't find one I like, so I chose a couple of morning glories for this summer.

I defined a bed area in the big pile of dirt and planted the plants with some cow manure and Cockadoodle Doo fertilizer (chicken shit pellets). I also moved some alyssum D's grandmother gave me last summer into this area too. D then picked up some nice dark brown mulch, and I finished off the little garden. Now all we need to do is grass in the rest of the dirt. I'm pretty happy with how my new lamp post garden turned out.

This weekend also marked the near completion of the master bedroom. On Saturday our furniture was delivered, we bought a celing fan, and we finally bought a mattress. On Wednesday night we'll sleep in the finished bedroom (the only other time we slept in that room was the night we closed on the house a year ago). When the whole bedroom is complete I do a blog post of the "reveal." Check out this post for what it used to look like. The transformation astounds me!

This weekend we also looked at nursery furniture and a car. This time the Honda CRV. Unfortunately I was too beat on Saturday afternoon to take it for a test drive. After looking at it/sitting in it, it's still on our short list along with the Subaru Forrester and a Volvo V70 wagon. We wish that Toyota still made a Camry wagon--if they did we would buy one in a heartbeat. D's 1998 Camry has 200K miles and still runs like a champ!

And, the weekend was not all work and no play. On Sunday am we went to church at 8am (D's been going since March, this was my first time--8am is completely killer for me) and I met the couple that D runs into at the country store after church each week. They are a super nice couple who live in a nearby town and have been doing lots of work and gardening at their house. We sat and chatted with them for a while and I ate my 2nd breakfast. Then, I rushed out to meet my friend Karen (a friend I met through the newcomer's club last fall) for my 3rd breakfast of the day. I'm starting to make friends who live nearby which is a huge plus. All of my other friends live a minimum of 1/2 hour away or as far as across the country!

That pretty much wraps up the weekend, though I'll post tomorrow about the wildlife that visited us on Saturday. Oh how I love living in suburbia!!! (seriously, I do)