One Room Challenge - Week 6
We worked our tails off this week to try and catch up on the ORC because we were out of town last week. We did so much this week. Before vacation, we had been working on the garden boxes and that’s really as far as we’d gotten. We were short 4 feet of wood and we were able to get that before leaving town. We also ran into a small snag in that we had to dig out a tree stump because the roots were messing with the level-ness of one of the garden beds, so that took almost an entire day to get out.
But this past Saturday, we were able to put in several hours of work.
AJ finished the garden beds and we started tearing up the ground around the beds in order to be ready to lay mulch. The ground near the gutter downspout was holding a lot of water because there is a very small incline there, so AJ spent time digging that up and laying some river rock to help with the water retention. We are also going to extend the downspout so that water actually goes down the hill rather than just sitting and soaking the grass right next to the garden beds. We will then hide the extended spout under the deck when we extend the deck next year.
Previously, we had a stone border on that same side of the house with the garden beds that defined the area where the Hostas are. We decided to pull up that stone border and move those stones to the other side of the house where we have additional Hostas. We are going to put a much larger stone border around the entire garden area on this side which is why we moved them. We got those in place, but need about 17 more because that side of the house is longer due to the garage. We were also able to place our compost bin near the garden as well and get that started. In order to place it where we wanted, we had to dig up and replant one of our Hostas, but Hostas are so resilient, we weren’t too worried about it. We will be adding more Hostas to the west side of our house, but we will get those from transplanting Hostas from other areas around the yard.
The other bulk of our work on Saturday was transplanting and planting. Friday night we ran to the nursery to pick out our purple Lilacs for along our back fence line, our Hydrangea bushes for the front garden, Boxwoods and Weigela for the back patio retaining wall. We also picked up some Drift Rose bushes on Saturday to plant in the front garden.
The purple and pink Hydrangea bushes were planted below the window in our front garden. We moved the boxwoods from that location up to the middle row of the front garden, and planted 6 Drift Rose bushes as ground cover closest to our lawn. We dug up the Allium and Tulip bulbs that were in the front garden and transplanted them in between all of the Hosta bushes so that in the spring, there will be a nice pop of color between the green of the Hostas. I’m not sure how great they will look this year after transplanting, but I am hopeful for next spring!
In the backyard, we planted two purple lilac bushes along the fence line on either side of our wedding white Lilac bush. We also transplanted the 3 larger rose bushes that WERE in the front garden to the side garden as well. We are planning on tilling and mulching and adding a rock retaining wall to that side garden, but that will be a later summer project.
Along the patio retaining wall, we planted our Boxwoods and wine Weigela bushes. The trellis’s that are currently there, will be moved to the fence line garden as soon as we get that area tilled and mulched. I will probably plant climbing roses to grow up the trellis’.
Like I said, it was a lot this week and I’m really impressed with how much we got done! The next few weeks up until the reveal will be filled with the finishing touches on the garden beds, tilling the garden bed area, mulching EVERYTHING, getting the trellis’s up and planting our garden beds!
