Our Garden Adventure

Please be patient! This site is graphic intensive, and I think it's worth the wait! Hope you do too!

Before we embark on this story, I guess we need to let you know what we started with. For many years, our "landscaping" consisted of little more than keeping the lawn mowed and trimmed. Our yard is approximately 1/2 acre. The shrubbery was already past the point of trimming it to save it. I wish I had taken some pictures of how things looked before we started, but then hindsight is always 20/20 isn't it? :-) I'll spare you the details on how that shrubbery left here because I get tired thinking about it. With the shrubbery gone, we were faced with some dirt that had not been cultivated in over twenty years. One of our first purchases was a Mantis tiller. That was our life saver! That little 20 pound tiller is amazing! Our son calls it the "Tasmanian devil"!

If I may, I would like to offer a freebie bit of advice. Let one of your purchases be a child's wagon. Get the molded plastic kind that allows you to remove the sides if needed. Ours is made by Little Tykes, and it has been used to carry just about all of our flowers, statuary and gardening supplies. It beats using a wheelbarrow any time, because it's not as hard on your back, and it also comes in handy when the grandbabies come for a visit. Those wagons will carry a lot more weight than the manufacturer states, but don't overload them with children!

After we finally got the dirt in good condition we planted 15 azaleas where those overgrown shrubs had been. While the dirt was torn up, I decided to plant some flowers there as well. I had always wanted a flower garden. Since I had some decent dirt to work with now, my flower garden started! I went crazy! I started buying flowers, flowers and more flowers. Wayne would just shake his head and drag out the Mantis. I had flower beds everywhere! I was always buying more flowers than I had places to plant them!

Here's a few pictures of the things we planted in 1999. It's also a shameless plug for our digital photography. *Grin* I love to do macro photography, so I hope you don't mind getting up close and personal with flowers! Enjoy!

By mid summer, we were already thinking about planting spring bulbs. We already knew what we wanted, so we decided to surf the internet and see what was available there. Should we plant a mail order garden? You betcha! Seriously, we knew we wanted to plant lots of spring bulbs and perennials and we didn't want to fight the crowds in our local lawn and garden centers. So we started searching the web and found just what we was looking for. We found that Garden.com and DutchBulbs.com were excellent sources for the perennial plants and bulbs we were looking for. We admit we were skeptical, but when they shipped our orders, we were amazed. Every shipment was in excellent condition and everything arrived at the time we should be planting, along with planting and care instructions.

We carefully tucked each lily, hyacinth, daylily, tulip, daffodil, iris and peony into its winter bed, trying to visualize the beauty it would bring in the spring of 2000. It was like waiting for the birth of a baby! Our neighbors had watched us plant our flower gardens, and they expressed their anticipation of spring many times because they were as anxious as we were to see the flowers. Don't tell anybody, but we planted so many bulbs that we forgot where we planted them. :-)

After a very snowy winter, spring finally arrived. Since then, our yard has been ablaze with color as Mother Nature has orchestrated her spectacular unveiling of the New Millennium's gardening season. It has been absolutely breathtaking! Come! Take a walk through our little Y2K garden. Don't be surprised if you encounter a few "flying flowers" (butterflies) along the way. Enjoy!

	Spring/Summer 2000 - I
	Spring/Summer 2000 - II
	Spring/Summer 2000 - III
	Spring/Summer 2000 - IV
	Spring/Summer 2000 - V

I might add here that planting all of our flowers wasn't the only renovation we did on our yard. We became totally crazy over statuary and fountains. They have become very popular around here so we purchased quite a few to dress up our garden. So, come on in and take a look at the statuary and some wide angle shots of the garden as well. Once in a while I don't do macro shots! :-)

My, how time flies! Here it is fall again! We had a pretty decent start on our spring bulbs this past spring, so basically we just built on that. We added a lot more of what we already had, plus some new varieties, colors, etc. So, it's back to the waiting game. Thank God we took lots of pictures last spring so we can enjoy those flowers while we wait on the new ones to come up and bloom in the spring of 2001. Here we go again! :-) I promise to be there when the first flower wakes up!

Here are a few books that I've found to be extremely helpful with this gardening adventure. Hope you will too!

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	1999 Garden Pics - Part One
	1999 Garden Pics - Part Two

	The Statuary and Fountains
	Other Views Of The Garden