Well.. I just had to do something. The plain old boring
flower bed in the front of my house was just too much to look at anymore and I didn't have the motivation to maintain it in its current state. Plus being overweight (280lbs) and sick of that too I thought of no better way to start losing weight and creating a master-piece (I think so anyway) than to sweat it out and git-er-done.
Since my last post here I actually started to grow most of my own
plants from bulbs,
seeds, cuttings from friends and any other way that I could. Keep in mind that I'm in
zone 9 - 10 and it gets really hot here in New Orleans (lose the weight)
After 2 months of trial and error (trust me) trying to grow my stuff:
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that I wanted I started out just removing and potting ALL the
flowers in the existing flowerbed. Man, new
seedlings and
plants don"t seem to grow fast enough at fisrt.. Then BOOM. Next thing I know EVERYTHING is
growing HUGE and faster than my new flowerbed. Now that I had the plans drawn up and ideas brainstorming I wanted to increase the size a bit both hizontally and in width. Originally the size of the bed was 24ft long and 2 1/2 wide running the entire length of my front porch and was just a place to stick
plants. BORING... I thought to myself, NO WAY. Let's add a few feet in both directions and add some depth.. Well.. Here I go.. This new bed was going to be 26 1/2Ft long and 5 1/2 feet wide with pointed corners for accent.
I bought a really nice tiller, 8 bags of manure/ compost, 15 bags of Miricle grow flowering soil, new wheel barrow (more on this later), shovels, rakes, 100 Landscape treated logs, a hand made sifter that I used to get all the construction debris (Rocks, boards, pipes) that was burried and past owners kids toys (You can't imagine what I found) and all hardware that you could possibly need to put this MONSTER together.
I must add that my back yard was about 1 -2 feet higher in some spot along my fence line because when I had concrete poured about a year ago the builders didn"t know what to do with it and had no means of transporting it elsewhere. I had them build up the areas by my fence that my dogs had trampled down. The level wasn"t good since the rain would come onto my back patio because of the slope. This was really an omen since I had no idea that I'd use it later as top soil. Anyway, it took me 4 hours of tiller work to loosen up the soil that our dogs had compacted which was grown over with grass, 37 wheel barrows of sifted top soil and countless hours of re-tilling in the miracle grow, compost/manure with each dump of the wheel barrow to keep the mixture as even as I could.
I've just about finished it and here are some pictures.
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More to come..
I can't see the last 2 sets of pics. 
