Random Happenings: Innocent enough, part 2

I recently wrote about a wooden frame we inherited from our neighbor. To recap, she didn't want it anymore and we thought we could use it to make a new vegetable garden. The new vegetable garden needed dirt, so we ordered the minimum amount from the dirt company. Of course, it was way more than we needed. So now what do we do with all that extra dirt?

As soon as Nathan suggested a new flower garden for the backyard, I jumped on the idea. "Oooh, pretty pretty flowers!" I dreamed with little thought to the extra work it implied. We outlined the new flowerbed to wrap around our master bedroom and began hauling dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. Here is the result of a lot of shoveling, hoeing, and sweating: That evening, like the engineering nerd I am, I drew up a scale drawing of the new flower bed so we could plan out what flowers to buy and were to place them. Maybe all those design shows have finally gone to my head. I would draw up something, show it to Nathan, and he would reply "do you think we can fit all that in there?". I would then draw up something new, with a few less plants, and show it to him again. After a few iterations, I finally got it down to a reasonable number of plants. I guess I was a little over excited --- I think my first drawing had well over 25 plants in it!

The next morning, Nathan took me around to a few nurseries to buy plants. We got a lot of good ideas talking to people there. In fact, I don't think we bought a single plant we originally had on the plans. They were all completely different, and some of them we had never seen before! Here is what we planted:


Cigar Plant: the small orange flowers attract hummingbirds and butterflies, Nathan's favorite	Purple Salvia: picked because the purple looked nice with the orange of the cigar plant

Ice Plant: not sure why it is named that, my favorite because of the small red flowers and thick succulent-like leaves	Rose Bush: the nursery promised us it is hardy, our first rose bush ever

Vinca: white with red centers to coordinate with the other flowers, plus we know we won't kill it!