The garden tour (or meet my babies): Over all...

We "jumped" off the porch over to the corner of the yard. This is the whole front yard

I have big plans to cardboard/pine needle mulch the whole front and put easy to care for TX toughies.
Lets zoom in a little...here you can see the window boxes, deck (THANK YOU to the people before us that built the deck:), and the hollies that came with house (FULL of berries)...

Ok lets go a little to the right...Yep! Its a boat!

But for now let's look past the boat (if you can:) to the planting behind it.

I planted this in late May-one tiny cleome, one tiny moonplant, one tiny castor bean (all three came from FTW plant swap!)

This is it two weeks ago...

You can see under this planting is a turned over cracked pot full of shells from the coast, you can't even see it now. Today we have catapiller damage-
I couldn't find the bugger so I'm going back later.

Ok, the boat. Before, in the rent house, I 'held' over plants in this boat which was very good at retaining water. I experimented with a garden in it-but I mulched it with black mulch and couldn't ever tell if it was dry or not. Then I added pots of roses to fill in the empty spots, and no one was doing well.

This is what it looked like when first planted (taken from the deck)

So, I pulled up a chair, pulled out all the mulch, re-potted the roses (amazingly they wanted repotting after two years in very little dirt-they are blooming like crazy now) buried them in the soil, used bamboo to tie up the tomato plants (which haven't produced but look healthy-we are holding them over for fall), and watered everything.

left to right: pot holding 3 roses that became a dry herb bed, midnight blue rose, tomato, (mallow, daylily babies, valentine rose and sedum behind the tomato)




this is a 'before' picture of the sedum with a valentine rose

basil, love potion rose in pot (wanting to be repotted:)

left front to back-wine cup rose, mex honeysuckle, midnight blue rose (in pot), basil, tomato; middle front to back-roma, lavender lady mini rose, weeping sedum (baby tears); right front to back-tomato, midnight blue in pot

tomatoes, mostly cherry or pears
Ok, tomorrow the little dry herb bed...