Flower Beds: Part Deux

Riding the high of our mulching success, we decided to make another trip to Meadow Farms the following day to pick up some pansies for our beds.  The re-mulching project made our beds look 100 times better, but we felt like they could use a splash of color.  Our existing variegated euonymus provide some bright greens, but really, it's all just a bunch of green and brown.  Since pansies are the only flowers recommended for planting at this time (we haven't officially reached our free from freezing threat time), that's what we went with.  We chose a bunch of yellow pansies with some dark wine-colored centers to provide that punch of color we were looking for.

One of our little pansies.

With our Manhattan euonymus' location still TBD, we also bought four little boxwoods to plant as a small hedge lining our front walkway.  That was the initial plan for the Manhattans, but we decided their size and unruly shape wouldn't work best as a walkway hedge.  So, armed with the four boxwoods, two plats of yellow pansies, a bag of Leafgro soil conditioner, and some sort of plant food stuff, we headed home to do our planting.

One little boxwood.

Our soil is evil.  It's gross, dense, and slimy clay riddled with tons of rocks of all sizes.  Needless to say, digging about 20 or so small holes to plant our new pansies was a pain.  We had to dig the hole, mix in the Leafgro with some of the evil clay, and then attempt to surround the poor things with lumps of the clay.  Looking back, and if we had the money, we should have dug down into the beds, removing the nasty clay and dumped in a whole ton of topsoil.  Hopefully our pansies will have the strength to take root and survive until May or June when they're expected to die off anyways.  What a sad pansy existence.  John also stuck a few in a planter box we used back at Overlook and hung that by the front door.  I'm sure the pansies in our clay look up at them and wish they could live in such a nice and cushy environment.

Little pansies and tiger blood bushes.

Hopefully it'll fill in...

Living the high life.

The new old planter box.

It was a little easier to plant the boxwoods since we could use the shovel and cut right through the clay.  We mixed in some Leafpro in their holes, too, and covered the base with a little blanket of leftover mulch.  By the time we had finished all of this, it became dark, so we now have four unplanted bushes.  At least they have each other to hang out with.  The two remaining boxwoods will be planted along the other side of the walkway and hopefully they'll all flourish and we'll end up with a cute little hedge.

Half a baby hedge.

Our half hedge/half homeless bushes... at least they have each other.

So, we've graduated from hardscaping to... softscaping?  I'm hoping we'll be able to overcome our terrible black thumbs of doom and destruction and the poor guys will make it at least a year.  We had a great time, though, playing in the dirt and trying to provide Grafton with a little bit of curb appeal.  However, I don't even want to think of the kinds of horrors that await us in the backyard: land of hard packed dirt, broken glass, a jillion rocks, exposed roots, poison ivy, and moss patches.  I wonder if I could get one of these back there...