Garden Update, Part Two

I think I will arrange things in "before" and "after" groupings.

Before:

Decent garden shovel with broken handle, broken snow shovel with functional handle.

After:

Functional garden shovel!

Before:

Tree with only a few leaves under it.

After:

Leaves raked so I could add them to the compost bin! (Yes, I really want stuff for my compost bin!)

Before shots of garden I ended up working on:


(Pruned off the dying blossoms from the hydrangea to the left of the steps too, but forgot to take an "after" shot of that.)

Before:

Perennials waiting to be planted: peony that's been living in the bucket since... May? June? Too long, at any rate. Plus a hosta and something else from a neighbour that arrived in the last week. (But those are still waiting.)

During:

Crud, this dirt is like *concrete*!!! And the environmentally-friendly peat moss substitute was one of the things the garden centre was out of, so I don't have any to add to this dirt while it's being dug anyway!

(Huh... looks like folks didn't rip up the old sidewalk before laying the paving stones.)
Compost from mom's in my wheelbarrow that was a housewarming present from my grandma:

I was going to spread it around to more than just this one spot, but I decided this one spot could really use this much and more, so in it all went. (If I'd had the peat-moss substitute, I might have used less... but then, I didn't manage to get much compost out of mom's bin before the uncomposted stuff started to collapse anyway.)

After:

Yay, the peony is finally back in the ground!!! I put in one of the grasses I bought two weeks ago... it's probably too close to the peony, but I thought it might work anyway because of its height. The violets are probably too close too, but I figured they'd peek out from under the peony. I might move them later. We'll see.

I only put back two of the clumps of violets... the garden seems pretty overrun by them, so I decided to compost the rest. (I've decided this year with be an experimental year, to see what roots compost... I'll sift them out when I'm using the compost if they prove not to break down sufficiently.) Well, I did put a few of the smaller clumps of violets over in my "secret super-shady hideaway"... if they don't survive, it won't be a big loss. If they do survive, bonus.

The day-lily that *had* been where the peony was I was going to put in the back lane along the fence, but it turns out there's only an inch of dirt there, and then there's a paving stone. I stared at the stone for a bit before deciding that it could stay there, and I'd figure out what to do with the dirt on top of it. (Weeds can grow in that much, day-lilies can't.) So, for now, the day-lily is sitting under the evergreen, where it might get planted tomorrow. (Not a good way to transplant something, just leaving it sitting there pretty much bare-root, but there's way too many day-lilies in this garden, so if I lose one, I'm not that worried. I'm pretty sure there's at least two identical to this one still in the front garden.

Random photo:

Huh... there's a day-lily blooming!