Garden projects

One of the garden projects we have been working on is not in our own garden but for our friend Marian. We started it a number of years ago as a birthday present for her. She had a juniper hedge around the front of her house and it was nice and easy to maintain but it didn't give much character to her house and she wanted a change so we decided to help her redo it with some California natives and other plants that would give a little more color and texture but did not require very much water. This is the front of her house before (well, actually, we started tearing it out before we thought to take a picture so imagine that the hedge went all the way across).
And this is what we replaced the left side of the house with (this is after it grew in a bit...the plants started off fairly small).But we didn't get any more of it done that this because it was sooo much more work than we anticipated. One of the reasons that her hedge was easy to maintain and there was almost no weeds to kill was that the previous owner filled the entire planter box with rocks. Big rocks, small rocks, tiny rocks...seemingly endless rocks. We dug out a good portion of it and replaced it with proper soil. So the right side of the house remained the same for the next several years because we afraid to open that can of worms again. Plus we were busy with the girls.

This year, for her birthday, we decided to continue working on the house and chose just the very front portion next to her entryway to work on. But we decided that there was no way we would be able to get it done the way we did it before so we just removed the rocks around the areas that we were planting and put some soil in those sections so that the plant would have something to thrive on. Here is Christian with the trunk of the juniper plus the roots that we got out.

It was still a lot of work because it is so difficult to dig around in the rocks. But this was still a ton easier than what we did last time. Hopefully it will work out okay like this.

The problem with our so called birthday presents to Marian is that she usually ends up working along side of us most of the time (or in the case of the last time we did this, she spent weeks digging up and hauling rocks to help us prepare the bed). So not only does she have to slave away doing manual labor but she usually ends up cooking up a feast for us as well.

So um...happy birthday Marian...I think...?!

Anyway, this past weekend, we went out for dim sum to officially celebrate her birthday with some of her other good friends and we put in one more plant. They are all pretty small right now so it looks a little sparse but they will fill in as the other side did. We are still missing a couple of plants. One of which was really plentiful at all the garden stores and home improvement stores just a month or so ago, but can't seem to be found anywhere now. Here is what it looks like right now.Happy Belated Birthday Marian...