Strike While the Iron Is Hot!

 April 3rd will be our one-year anniversary at Pine Cone Lane; hard to believe!!  For these eleven months I have been studying this yard and property knowing that when the house remodel was finished , the real fun would begin!!

My studying left me with quite a to-do list. On the list was balancing out the driveway up to the house.  

On the left side of the drive is a huge, HUGE bed filled with neglected azaleas in desperate need of pruning and fertilizing, as well as clumps of bulbs in desperate need of dividing.

The overgrown bed.

My plan was to get into this thing with my pruners on a cold day while the snakes were still lethargic, but then summer arrived in February! I will have to trespass into the snake's territory, but have decided to let everything bloom first. (Just to help you orient yourself, the 'orchard' is located in the cleared area behind all of these trees.

The bulbs that have bloomed so far are daffodils,

paper whites, snow bells, and some cute little purple thing that I don't recognize.

There are lots of daylilies, too. 

So I decided to build a matching bed on the on the right side of the drive. There were a couple of azaleas already there, bless their pitiful hearts, but no bulbs. I transplanted azaleas from other parts of the property and have been adding bulbs from across the drive. I add the bulbs by dividing clumps when they bloom so I know what I'm moving and can distribute accordingly. I know they should be divided in the fall, but sometimes you have to strike while the iron's hot.

There are still lots of bulbs yet to bloom and I will move them as the weeks go by. By this time next year, there will be prettiness on both sides of the drive-if the snakes don't get me first.

Until tomorrow, 

Shelli

Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.

~Mrs. C.W. Earle,

Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, 1897

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.

~Charles Dudley Warner

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden.

~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666