Two weeks later

Stage three, which was really the planting of all the flowers and the vegetables - oh yes, I forgot to mention I decided I wanted to grow vegetables and lots of them. Anyway, stage three was delayed by 2 weeks as I had a business trip, which was probably for the best as I was told not to plant in the ground before the May long weekend, so my business trip was the perfect sejour to delay my over excitement at planting my first garden. My business trip also taught me another very important lesson about being a gardener - you must find someone to water your garden for you while you are gone who will do the job in a consistent, reliable manner because otherwise when you come home your garden will be fried (especially if they didn't even come one) - even your beautiful luscious clover will turn a lovely browny, yellow and you will feel like all your work was for not . . .

I have to say finding my garden in a semi-fried state was very sad and I felt extremely frustrated and sad, however, luckily my girlfriend Marki was visiting me and she had gardening experience and we worked together to rescue the garden and plant the seeds and flowers. Step one was to water, water and more water. Then Marki and I headed out to Rona (which is now my favourite garden shop - I find it cheaper than Home Depot and I really like how they have the drive through area where they load the bags of soil, rocks, mulch and manure into the car for you) and purchased some flowers for the garden. I decided to go with a red, white and pink sort of theme although you will notice from the picture that the marigolds really throw everything off, but since they are a natural pesticide they are very useful. Again, this tip from my Mum - the rockstar gardener. Ok, so I purchsed pionies, two white rose bushes, a pink lily, and some other really cute bright pink flowers as well as some filler so once it starts to grow it will fill out. We also purchased 12 bags of manure and soil to mix in with the sandy, rocky stuff that was there to make it more hospitable for plant life. Oh, I forgot to mention that I have Leif the farmer come by with a rotter tiling machine to rotter till the garden, which saved me about a days hard labour and was definitely worth the 50$ investment.

Marki and I got to work on Tuesday - it was sweltering outside to say the least so armed in our booty shorts and wife beaters we began to attack the flower bed. We watered, then dumped soil and manure and mixed it all together with the hoe and then water some more so that the soil would be ready for planting. Marki taught me a very important lesson that sweltering Tuesday afternoon - when digging holes to plant flowers water the hole, plant the flower and then fill in the hole with soil then gently sprinkle with water. This helps to make the flowers happy and reduce the amount of trauma they feel about being transplanted and relocated. This information really transformed my approach to planting and also made me realize that I didn't really do the best job of planting my Mum's flowers when I was 16 tears old, because I definitely didn't do that.

So at the end Tuesday we had a beautiful flower bed complete with red cedar mulch in between the flowers and fencing around the bed with the little solar lights. That night post a scrub down in the shower I was able to enjoy fantastic company, a barbeque and friends in my backyard and enjoy the fruits of the days labour with a nice glass of white wine . . . ok, maybe it was more than a glass. Also it was incredible to think what had been there only 5 weeks ago!!!