Shake What Your Mama Gave You....

I do not take after my mother when it comes to gardening. My mother has a sick green thumb. She can make a pile of dirt and weeds into an array of color, and style that stay alive all season and come back stronger each year. Me?  My thumb is brown. Sure I have a couple house plants that have made it through the years, even though they may have been starved from time to time and I have the hanging flowers each season that last about a week or two. My basil plant last year made it 2 weeks! (hollleer!) But that is the extent to where my planting skills go. Words like "soil" and "annuals" are foreign to me, and I just learned today what "perennial" meant.

So each year since I moved on my own, my mother would come down to VA in the spring to "help" (and I say that graciously since she really does all the work and I would just sit back with the "are you sure it should go there?" "whats that thing called..oh a shovel?" "I have to dig a hole?" "what?..wine..please"). So the plan was for her to come this weekend with my sister since me and Sissy were running a half marathon this weekend.

Our yard was a mess. We had weeds growing in our flower bed like crazy, I actually thought the weeds were maybe plants because they were so full, so I was so excited to get it all cleaned up this weekend. The worst thing happened though. My mother could not make it down on Friday as she was really sick. I was so worried! I mean, who would plant our flowers and clean up our ghetto garden?? (don't get the panties in a bunch, I totally made sure mom was OK and just had a bug before I started to bug about the garden, moms OK : )

So I had to put my big girl pants on and do the gardening myself. Hubby and I thought we'd do it together, you know some bonding type stuff. So this morning we set out to Lowe's on our first gardening excursion alone! (Sissy was home with Noogs and Boo before she left for her venture back NJ).

We walked around a little aimlessly at first, there was a lot of "what do we get?" "should I call my mom?" "let me take a pic, I'll send it to her to see if that's the right one". Thank God my phone died because then it made us do everything on our own.

So after an hour of aimless looks and reading tags, we got some flowers, new baby bushes (we were pulling old dead ones out), new mulch, some tools and solar lights. I was excited at this point to get started. This is what our front yard looked like before.

Dead bushes, lots of weeds, old mulch

First thing we did was pull out those awful bushes...easy task. Noogs helped too.

Then we started planting all the new stuff...

Noogs wanted to name every bug we found...

Oh and I got these for my flower basket in front. I have no idea what they are called, but they're pretty : )

I loved these too, something "pillowtalk" or something, thought they were pretty with a cool name!



Things were really coming along and I was so excited we did it ourselves without mom holding my hand. Of course there were some phone calls to her about some term "edging" that I don't think we did, and we're still unsure if we should put some kind of stone around the bed like we had before because we took old stone out. BUT, I love it. I love it because we did it ourselves as a family and I actually enjoyed doing it instead of finding it to be a pain in the.... I even found myself at one point saying outloud "poor little guy" when a flower I took out and replanted seemed really floppy. So here it is, our finished product!



I'm not a big "lawn ornament" type person...but I LOVE this, mostly because my Mimi bought this for me. And its solar powered, so it lights up at night. (just went outside to check it out and it looks nice : )

And this guy I've had since my apartment, so he's practically family.

So there you have it folks, our first gardening experience alone. It was fun and I think after today I may have somewhat of a greener thumb. My mama would be proud!