Spring planting!
Boy, I’ve got the “spring bug” big-time!
Forget the indoors home improvement for a while… I’m going outside!
Last week, I spent a good deal of time doing gardening-related work. I decided to create one new flower bed this year: a butterfly garden. I figured if my wife and I each create one new bed or project per year, we’ll have a huge beautiful garden in no time!
To start with, I went outside to the bay window that juts out from the dining room. I then stuck a stake in the ground and tied one end of some string to it. Then I measured out somewhere between 8 and 10 feet of string… and on the other end, attached a can of white spray paint.
Then I simply stretched out the string and painted a white line on the grass in an almost-perfect semi-circle.
I spent the next few hours cutting out and removing all of the grass in this semi-circle. (I dumped it behind the garage, where I intend to build a compost heap in the next week or two.)
After doing this, I now had a large depression in the yard. I needed to fill it in with some dirt. Well, I opened up my copy of the local monthly gardening newsletter, called “The Kansas City Gardener”. In it were a lot of ads for local landscaping supply companies offering mulch and topsoil. But few of them were close to my house. (I figured I’d be going and getting the dirt with my pickup truck, so no sense going very far from home!)
I saw an ad for “Missouri Organic Recycling”. The ad included a $20 off coupon if I bought at least 3 yards of compost…. at $23.95 per yard….and compost was definitely my first choice for a material to use to build my butterfly garden bed. I did the math and figured I’d need just over 2 cubic yards. So, I thought, I might as well get one yard free!
I made two trips (at one cubic yard per trip in my pickup truck), filled up that bed, and had a little bit left over. As of this posting, I haven’t yet gone to pick up the third cubic yard. But I intend to use that to just “help out” the other flower beds in the yard.
Then, my wife and I started our plant shopping.
I hate to say it, but WalMart had some really low prices on columbines… $2.50 per pot. (I haven’t learned my pot-sizes yet, but I’d guess that that was a 4 or a 6 inch pot. I bought four of them.) My wife bought two hybrid tea roses at about $7.95 each (as I recall).
I had told her that I wanted to put a birdbath in the front yard… in an area where previously a small weeping cherry had been growing. But we had given away the weeping cherry (to Berry Construction) and now we had a dirt circle in the front yard. I put a birdbath there (purchased from Lowes for $22)… and my wife wanted to surround the birdbath with roses.
Next, we tried Family Tree in Liberty, Missouri, at the recommendation of a friend. We were shocked by just how HEALTHY the plants were there. However, the prices reflected this. I had thought they’d be a better deal. My friend who recommended them says I need to check out their website and grab their Internet coupons before my next visit.
Their purple coneflowers were the least healthy thing I saw, and of course, that’s what I was looking for. They were priced at $9.99 too.
So, I ended up buying three Bee Balm plants from them, two red, and one pink. My wife was very disappointed that they didn’t have many roses in-stock. They had “Weeks” roses, but she didn’t seem to be interested in those.
Next, we went to a nursery that’s a bit closer to our house… one that we KNEW had a good selection of roses on-hand… Farrand Farms. (OK, so the roses are Jackson and Perkins roses, which are a bit pricey.)
Terry bought one Chrysler Imperial rose and I planted that just behind the front-yard birdbath. I bought two purple coneflowers (for $7.99 each… and they were very healthy!).
Lastly, we visited a local “corner market” kind of “plant stand”… “Tony’s Flowers” on 23rd and Maywood in Independence.
He didn’t have many perrenials… yet… but his prices on what he had were about $2 less for the same size at the other nurseries! My wife bought some impatiens and I bought some salvia, which looked so pretty (red in color) that I thought they’d make a nice addition to my butterfly garden, despite the fact that I had sworn to avoid annuals as much as possible.
My butterfly garden still needs a few plants, but a friend of ours…. Robin Weeks… who not only is a member of our church but also is the one who introduced us to the “Independence Garden Club”… has promised me several butterfly-attracting plants from his yard!
On my next time-off, I hope to get those plants, plus get that third load of compost… plus get some sort of mulch to put over the top of the butterfly garden. My wife first suggested that I get that mulch where it’s wood-chips painted red, but I’m not too sure about that. My parents had wood-chips when we were a kid. And I found them to be somewhat messy… and you’re always having to replenish them. I think maybe I’ll identify some good ground cover to use instead.
As far as the house interior goes, my wife is already talking about painting the master bedroom… whereas I’m leaning towards getting an electrician to wire up a ceiling light fixture in that room first, before we do any painting.
We’ll see who wins this debate.
Have a great week!
-= Dave =-