DMG: The First Plantings

   A little garden fashion...I believe in dressing for the job. I am also wearing my turquoise rubberized garden gloves. All of this finery is needed to watch Dave do the work, while I do the project management. Ha!
We got an early start, as I like to work in the cool part of the day, break for lunch and then return later, like after 5pm for some more digging. In the afternoon, I gotta knit.
First we raked away the wood chips that had covered this spot, and then Dave manned the Honda tiller, grinding up the weeds and tilling in the new bags of composted manure.


 
I love a man with a tiller. The dawgs were with us all day and ran up and down and wrestled each other, and when we took break, we each had one on our lap.
In order to make the bed easier to till, the existing plants had to be lifted and set aside until they could be returned to their new sites. Since we had had some days of rain, the roots clumped up and suffered no shock sitting out for a few hours. Then they went back in like butter in the new loose soil.

 The shade began to dissapate just as I finished putting in the miscanthus at the back of the new bed. This morning I realized they are too close together and will be taking two of these out and leaving just three. They will get really big in just two years and be nearly unmovable. Better to be safe than sorry.

An example of a big one in the pond garden, so I should know better than to put them too close together.

We relocated the monster hosta to the shady side of the garden and later in the day added four more specimens from the pond garden, bringing the hosta count to 19. We have five distinct hosta gardens now.



This new garden, Dave's Memorial, has caught our imagination and we are thinking about fancy tree specimens to add to the perennial color. Dogwood perhaps. White Lilac?  Japanese varigated maple tree? We've got the room...we'll see.