Sara's Garden MarketSustainable Living, Gardening, Flowers, and Food

Hi everyone!

I have been out of touch recently due to the dance studio recital finishing up and a huge landscaping project!

I used to have these huge ugly evergreen bushes right out my front door. They were ugly, they smelled gross and all they were good for was a rabbit hutch, which in turn got the rest of my gardens eaten to death by the rabbits!

A few months back I finally had some guys with a bobcat come and rip them out! They also took away a lot of the rock that was under the bushes. This landscape rock was put in circa 1980 and was not done right and so was completely mud packed and horrible to try to remove by hand. Thank you bobcat guys!

Here’s a picture of what was there before. In this pic I am actually getting a photo of the huge spider, but you can see where my front door is, and you can see the gross bushes and a huge thistle! YUCK – you can see why I wanted this eye-sore gone.

So, what I did was extend the flower garden that is in the front of my house into that space. 🙂 Here is a picture where you can see the flower bed and the bushes etc… (This is my daughter, Maddie right before her first soccer practice last year.)

And now, after 5 rose bushes, 5 day lilies, 1 dwarf Korean Lilac tree, plenty of petunias, 10 bags of red mulch, 5 bags of manure, 1 bag of peat moss and some garden accents it looks like this:

Now I am looking forward to relaxing next to this wonderful rabbit-free stink-free rock-free area!!!

Thanks for stopping by ~ Sara

Thank you to the bird or rabbit that ate some honey suckle berries and then came to Maddie’s garden! We have had this bush/tree for a few years now and I am going to attempt to train it into a topiary shape this year!

The first year it was going to be a tree = one long stalk/trunk and one sprig of honey suckle at the top. I cut that down to the ground almost. It came back and it brought friends! A little scary at first and I considered pulling it out all together. But honey suckle is such a sweet bush and perfect for a little girl’s garden so I left it.

Each year I prune it aggressively and the next season it comes back fuller. It wants to be very tall so I just cut it down. I think I have enough growth and fullness this year to shape it. In this same garden I have another bush that we call the “monster” bush. It wants to take over the whole garden so we cut it back all the time. And there is a clematis. It is in soil that has not been prepared and used to have several evergreen bushes in it.

I have had the clematis in there for about three years now and it looks like it is finally going to really go!

We call this flower bed Madison Square Garden. She has a lot to contribute about what goes into this garden and always plants an annual border around it which she plants mostly herself and then cares for by watering and weeding herself.

Will post pics later!

Thanks for stopping by!

~Sara

So, as many of you have heard I tore out a large juniper bush and one other small bush in front of my house to extend my flower bed last season.

There is rock packed with mud in this area as the previous owners had a rock bed with evergreen bushes before. (Which I despise!!!!!) I thought I could pick the rock out like I did with my other beds I have created around my house. Not so. There is so much mud packed in this bed that it would take all summer to get it out by hand. So I am calling in a professional service.

I am going to have the landscapers come with a bobcat/back hoe and dig out 1-2 feet of soil and rock and just haul it away. Next I will order square feet of top soil from my *local* *small* 🙂 garden market down the road here. I will need to let that soil rest and then test the Ph level and maybe adjust it a bit before planting because evergreens are so acidic!

Once that is done I can put in my ornamental tree and more flowers!

I will post before and after and during pictures!!!

Thanks for stopping by!

~Sara