Crossing things off the list

It's still pretty early, but I've managed to cross a few things off my to-do list.

First, my peach tree arrived last week, and I planted it on Sunday.

shovel marks the spot

He was 2-3 feet tall when I got him.

before

But after I planted him, I lopped off a good chunk.

after

I'm going to attempt to prune him so he doesn't grow to his full potential height of 20 feet. I saw instructions in the October/November 2015 issue of Mother Earth News last fall and decided to give it a try.

The second thing I did was dig all of the detested Stella d'Oro lilies out of my future herb garden.

holes instead of lilies

The best part is, I realized I could put them somewhere else instead of just killing them. There's a flower bed in the front of the house for which I have no immediate plans.

You can kind of see in this picture from last summer that it has perennials and shrubs in it: sedum, echinacea, stinky boxwoods, It had a couple small barberry bushes until a few weeks ago. Those prickly things were just waiting to get stuck in the dogs' feet. At any rate, with the barberries gone, there were some open areas, so I dug holes for the lilies, and in they went.

There are now lilies on both ends and in the middle between the sedum, in front of the echinacea. They should fill that bed in nicely and, as much as I hate them, they will probably look pretty good.

For what it's worth, the reason I have no plant plans for this bed is because my long-term goal is to put a covered porch on the house, meaning this whole flower bed will be under concrete. That's a ways off, though, so these perennials will have to look nice for a few more years.

Finally, I got some fence to put around the herb garden. With the daffodils starting to come up, it was getting obvious how much damage Scout can do to plants.

It's not pretty, but it keeps her out.

It feels good to be making progress. Lots more things to do.