Spring Fever: Weekend Digging

Hi!  It's almost time to drop the "spring" label, isn't it?  Maybe when I feel ready for summer to hit... lol!  I have done a little beading this weekend, and I will be doing more after I'm done here, but I wanted to update you on my garden plan.

Today I spent a few hours digging at the end of my trailer to make room for two spirea bushes.  I'm pleased with the progress I made today!

I should've taken a true "before" picture, but oh well.  Just imagine that the front area looked like the back does.  This is after I had cleaned out some of the grass/weeds and worked up the soil a little.  As you can see, the tongue of the trailer sticks out, there's lots of prairie (read: tall, thick, sharp) grass growing everywhere around the house, and there's a little spot in the siding on the skirting that was falling off.  For the record, we paid quite a lot for a professional skirting job last fall, and we keep finding corners he cut, and we're not pleased.

At any rate, I dug up all the dirt on one side of the tongue, screwed the siding back on the skirting (it had been just stapled, which is why pieces like to fall off... one of these days I'll just go around the house with a bag of screws and my screw gun and get it over with), and pulled out the grass and weeds.  I went down to my parents' house for something and Dad pointed out some small edging bricks he had lying around that he didn't have a use for, so I measured them and the space and figured out that he has almost exactly the right number to edge my little plot I'm digging!  Bonus! They're also a good color, a red-grey, which works well with the other reddish touches I have out there.  The siding on the skirting is pinkish-red, the deck is a lighter pinkish-red (thankfully in the same color family!), when I get the deck railing and picnic table stained they'll be red, the dirt is red, it just all seems to be working out that way.  The same thing happened in my living room and I'm pleased with it, so why not?

So, after a couple of hours of digging and a few trips down to my parents' house, this little plot is almost halfway done!  Tomorrow I'll get some peat moss to work into the soil and plant some of Mom's tiger lilies around the edge, then work on digging the rest back to the deck.  I don't have the spirea bushes yet, but on my next trip to Rapid City I'll go to Jolly Lane and see what they have that won't get too big for the plot.  Looks like their Renaissance, Mellow Yellow, or Firefold varieties should work... need to see what they look like.  I have nice big windows at the end of the trailer and I don't want them to get covered up, nor do I want to have to prune the bushes back much.

I'm not sure what to do about the gap in the tongue itself... it's not big enough or accessible enough to plant and I don't want to be pulling grass out of it all the time.  Maybe I'll just pile a bunch of rocks in there so nothing will grow and call it good.  If there's one thing I have up here, it's rocks!

My yellow siding is ugly, isn't it?  Alas, that part's pretty far down on the priority list.  Oh well. I got pretty far on this little spot of ground today, and maybe tomorrow I can finish it up.  It feels good to do a project like this and finally see some progress!  I'm so used to staring at the huge amount of work left on the terrace and feeling like I'm getting nowhere.  Maybe the occasional smaller project is necessary to boost confidence a little.