Heavy Lifting

Jen and I tackled the front bushes this past weekend. It was quite the undertaking. We ripped stuff out on Saturday and put stuff back in on Sunday. Luckily, we were able to borrow my neighbor's truck for the weekend to help us out.

We started pulling out the bushes with the aid of the truck. I just hooked some tie-downs around the bush and then yanked them out. Unfortunately, only one of the bushes came out using this method. A couple of others came out part-way and the rest didn't really work out.

So that meant I had to break out the axe and the shovel. A couple of hours later we had ourselves one large pile of dead bush and one large pile of tired Mark. It took us the rest of the day to pull out all of the little roots & clean up the area. Then we had to go dump all of the dead bushes & dirt out in the country in an undisclosed location. :^)

Sunday started out with a couple loads of topsoil to build up the flower bed. We decided to provide our plants with something besides rock-hard clay for them to live in. Our soil is just plain awful.

After throwing my back out shoveling 3,000 pounds of dirt we then proceeded to plant the new bushes. I'll give some before & after pictures when I get home. We planted two pygmy barberry bushes in the little area between the sidewalk, porch, & garage. In the main bed we planted a holly bush at each end, a regular red barberry in the middle, and two yellow eucy-somethings in between those. It turned out pretty nice. Still a lot of work to be done though.

The neatest thing was finding out that when you plant holly you need both a boy and a girl. There's a little cross-polination that needs to happen to get the pretty blooms. I found that interesting.

Anyway, now I'm tired. Ugh.