First harvest and other tidbits

Saturday was a day of random chores. I had been planning to plant out my tomatoes and peppers but our nighttime temperatures took a dip into the 30's for a couple days, so I held off. I did get a lot of other things accomplished, though.

I picked my first radishes, officially the first harvest from the new garden.

I might get smart this year and plant some more seeds so I can have radishes all season.

I finally got some stepping stones for the herb garden.

before

after

Now I have a path to get to the hose, which is behind the boxwoods.

Speaking of boxwoods, I've discovered something almost as much fun as digging out yuccas...cutting down boxwoods!

While boxwoods can certainly look nice, they require regular trimming, and they SMELL, so getting rid of them has been on the agenda since we got here. I didn't want to take them out without having something to replace them, however, since a giant empty space in the flower bed would just fill up with weeds. I have an order in for some native plants that should be coming in the next week, but another idea occurred to me the other day.

So, I cut down two of the boxwoods in the front flower bed...

one down

two down

and I dug up some of the many volunteer rudbeckias growing on the back wall, and

now I will have lots more flowers in this bed. In the front center and left in the above photo, you can see some of the lilies that I transplanted in March. This bed is going to be a full perennial garden, and the best part is that I was able to use plants that I otherwise would've thrown away.

When my other plants arrive, the last two boxwoods in this bed will go, as well as the two in the herb garden. Parts of this yard are almost unrecognizable from when we moved in, which is exactly what I wanted.

The last tidbit is some newcomers to the garden. Last weekend I helped my mom with some garden work. Part of what we did was pull up strawberry plants that had escaped their bed. I decided to try to save some of them, and I planted them in part of the wall garden.

They don't look great yet, but they're not dead.