Minus Before and After

I really need to remember to take "Before" pictures.

Picture a scraggly, cruel looking bush that runs on a flower bed separating our house from our neighbors, that is dying in the parts and has 3 random palms growing in strange places, for some reason no one can tell. That is what we used to have. It looks like it was our neighbors' property but a couple of months after moving in we were informed that it is OUR flower bed. Maybe it's true, or maybe he just didn't want to get rid of it himself, we may never know (although I'm sure we could know if we wanted to find out badly enough).

We ripped out that thing a couple of weeks ago. Many scratches, and Jeff gets the credit for the lion's share of the work. We transplanted the random palms into huge pots in the back yard. 1 of them is not doing so well, 1 is thriving, 1 was a lost cause before we could get it to the back yard. Then we were busy and had a dirt mound for a couple of weeks. No one sent us any hate mail so I'm going to assume the neighbors still are cool with us.

The dirt here in Ladera Land is more like clay. Maybe instead of flowers we could invest in a kiln and a potter's wheel and display our urns and paper clip holders (all I learned to make in 9th grade ceramics class) about our front yard, instead of buying flowers and watching them die in the crap dirt. To save ourselves the anguish of more failed flowers we bought:

nice dirt

and

manure.

Manure costs 99 cents per bag, in case you are in the market.

We also brought home gardenia bushes (I've decided these are an unexpected favorite!), geraniums, and english daisies for this flower bed.

If they fail, I will throw my hands up in the air and declare myself a gardening drop out. I will also get our money back from Home Depot, because they wrote their return policy, not me. But since we put manure in the dirt, I'm betting they'll grow. What more did they want? And I keep thinking me working with manure is a once in a blue moon type of thing, and then I remember I'm about to be in charge of diapers.

It needs to fill in, but here is the after shot:

Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it!

Merry Christmas, to our street!

Love,

The Hayes Family