Green-like Thumb

When we bought our house, I was so excited about having our own yard. There were fantastic ideas in my head of beautiful landscaping and a garden in the backyard full of fresh herbs and veggies and a lush, green lawn for our children to play and walk barefoot on.

I don’t know who I thought would take care of all of these things – perhaps I thought we’d be wealthy enough to afford a landscaper? Because certainly I wasn’t going to be the one to nurture all of these plants.

My mom is the green-thumb in the family. She can keep nearly anything alive, even if it’s on the brink of withering away. I, on the other hand, am usually the one who can get a plant to the nearly-withered-away state. My ability to kill plants is nearly a superpower – if I were an evil villain, I’d probably be called the Wilter.

It’s not intentional, though. I try to do my best with our yard. I had a garden for a few years, and even managed to produce some broccoli from that garden. Cosmo has reduced my ability to have a garden now, thanks to his evil sidekick taste for young plants, but I did do some container gardening last year that was a semi-success. And (with help) we planted our little arborvitae evergreen trees out back last year, which have so far survived my care.

With my new mission to make this house a little more home-like, I’ve had to take a tough look at the outside as well. I don’t want to be that house in our neighborhood. (To be honest, it would be really hard to be that house with the number of rentals and foreclosures in our area, but I’m also aiming to not be in the bottom 50% either.) My project this past weekend was the tree in our front yard.

We placed a little ring of landscaping bricks around this tree years ago. Originally there was mulch inside the ring, but over the years it’s all disappeared and the ring has contained a mess of dead leaves and weeds. Our soil is also extremely hard clay soil, making it impossible for things to grow well, and that’s resulted in our tree’s roots staying close to the surface as well.

The first thing I did was scoop out all of the leaves into a yard waste bag, along with pulling most of the weeds within the ring. Some of those weeds were stronger than expected and tried to pull back. Then I carefully adjusted the woefully uneven bricks, trying to make them lie even again. I wasn’t able to get them to lie perfectly even because the tree roots have pushed some areas up, but most of the ring looks pretty good now.

Tree roots made the back part of the ring bumpier than I’d prefer.

Next, it was time to fill in that ring. I emptied three bags of topsoil, combined with half a bag of peat moss, inside the ring around the tree and mixed it all up. At the very least, I hope covering the tree’s roots will help protect our red maple from the fate of so many other trees in the neighborhood. (Tree death is high when you live in a new subdivision that stripped all the topsoil off to sell before building houses on clay.)

Mira went with me on Saturday to pick out flowers to plant in the ring. A five year old doesn’t necessarily know the best flowers to pick, so I enlisted the help of a store associate. After describing to her my lack of skill with anything green, and my requirement that anything we buy needs to be easy to care for, able to handle some neglect, and preferably could handle itself like a weed, she pointed me to the right flowers. She didn’t even laugh at me, though, which I appreciated.

This was the final result:

Not a bad transformation compared to the naked tree above, right?

The light purple flowers are creeping phlox, and the bright pink ones (Mira’s choice, no surprise) are dianthus. And yes, I still had to look at the little cards that came with them to remember what they were and how to spell them.

There was nothing complicated to planting the flowers – I dug a hole with my hands, took the flower out of it’s plastic pot, and plopped it in the hole, filling the area back in with dirt. I’m not sure if I spread them out well enough, so we’ll see how they grow. I finished this project by covering everything with a good layer of mulch and a silent wish that they don’t die.

No really, please don’t die, little flowers. You cost too much.

And just like that, our front yard has a little bit of color now, hinting that someone actually lives in this house and cares about it’s appearance. The next step, of course, will be keeping these little plants from wilting away. Who knows – maybe if I can keep this little contained flower bed alive, I’ll add more flowers to other parts of the yard?