A Little Before And After

Edited to add: To those of you joining me from Kelly's Korner today, welcome here! I live in Southern Ontario, Canada and we have about a five month growing season. I don't know what zone we live in. My theory of gardening is I plant it and see if it grows. I try to pay attention to whether or not a plant like sun or shade or a mixture. I like planting perennials (come back every year) and annuals (flower until it freezes and then they die). We are a part of a CSA (community shared agriculture) so except for tomatoes, I don't really grow vegetables.

My advice is to wander through garden centres and see what flowers and plants you like. Then find out how they might grow in your yard. I water things a lot and talk to my plants. Seriously, love them and it does help :)

Another piece of advice I have is to ask around. Perennials often need to be divided when they get too big and people are often looking to get rid of their extra plants. You will read below that all of the plants I'd planted this day I got from friends. And of course I gave some back to them.

If you are interested in more of my yard you can click on the "Things That Grow In My Garden" tab on the right. Thanks for stopping by and if you have any questions, just ask. If I don't know the answers, I can always ask my mom and dad. My mom has been gardening since she was three and my dad owned a family-run garden centre for his whole career.

Yesterday I spent about six hours doing yard work. It was awesome except last night my arms were exhausted. Seriously, I couldn't really lift them. It was hard to type. (I know, that's kind of pathetic.) Anyway, the only tools I used were a tiny trowel (on the "to buy" list -- a real shovel!), a pair of scissors (also on the "to buy" list -- some lawn shears), and my handy Felcos (which kind of cancelled out the inadequacy of my other "tools").

After all this hard work, I was too tired to write a proper blog post so all you get is some "before" and "after" pictures. Please say you notice a difference and that all my work was not in vain :)

Before: weeds along the border and in the bed, nasty kind of ivy growing behind the water meter, empty spaces where plants could go.

After: no weeds along the border or in the bed, nasty ivy all gone, seven new plants filling up the empty spaces. (All the plants came from Tim and Janice's yard so this wasn't even a costly project! Win-win! (Also, thanks Tim and Janice!))

Before: Are there flowers in this bed? We can't see them behind all the grass growing along the border.

After Natasha spent some time with the scissors: Oh, there you are! (Yes, they're still kind of small but they're there.)

Before: Yes, the bed is full of greenery, but not the good kind.

 After: Two teeny little tomato plants. But they'll grow! Do you remember my tomato forest?