a wee spot of gardening

I learned something today. Gardening. Is not for wimps.

We live downtown, so our front yard is what I best descibe as a postage stamp! The extent of my gardening skills is walking around the grass on a weekly basis with our (very eco-friendly) push lawnmower. And digging out the dandelions, which I tell you, is a full-time job in itself every spring! On top of that, I normally even go all out and buy three hanging baskets, two for the top porch and one for the bottom porch.

But this year I decided it was time for a 'real' garden!

Today, yes, even though it was 32 degrees (celsius) of blistering heat, sweat and humidity, I dug up the grass/sod, put in some landscape edging, planted a couple of spirea shrubs, a dicentra - otherwise known as bleeding hearts and some other tree-kinda-thing that my Granny Brown used to have - I remember this, because my cousins and I used to pull off the blooms and play with them, as if they were little ballerinas! It's obvious at this stage that I'm not a gardener, right?! (Mum, or anyone else, if you know the name of this plant, let me know! It's the one behind Lilah in the second photo!)

We then added some mulch and watered the plants like mad. It took us 4 hours. But I have to say, it was rather therapeutic and I'm quite proud of myself! Maybe I'll eventually get onto this gardening thing after all!

Lilah, who was (supposed to be) my right hand woman, spend the best part of those 4 hours eating ice pops and torturing worms! Dear love them. I actually caught her with a pile of them in a flower pot and they were all wet - she confessed to me that she'd just given them a bath, because they were, in her words, muddy! I wish I had my camera handy and my hands weren't caked in soil. It was priceless.