Gardening in the South

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**Please excuse my diverging from coupon blogging while I engage in a little personal blogging about gardening!  I hope to catch up on my regular coupon/money-saving posts tonight!**

Aahhh..Gardening in the South.  It's not only the name of a beloved gardening book by famed ATL gardener, Don Hastings, but it's also something ever-evolving and ever-changing.

I love gardening.  Second only to Disney, it's one of my passions and hobbies.  Yes, the love of gardening ebbs and flows.  One day, I can't wait to get outside and play in the dirt, and other days, like a lot of us gardeners, I absolutely dread it.  Then...every once in a while, your hard work gets rewarded with scenery you only imagined in your head.

This morning was like that for me.  We all have visions in our head of what our garden(s) should look like, and I have mine.  It doesn't match anyone else's.  The visions might cross paths, but in the end, each vision belongs to its owner.  All gardeners are like that.  We all have a vision in our mind of what the "perfect" garden should look like.

Of course, there are no perfect gardens.  Just ever-evolving and changing ones.  I've been blessed with friends who garden, and every year we try to encourage each other along.  This year, my friend Sonya, told me she was building her own raised bed.  (Did you hear what I said?  SHE was building...)  I was so impressed, that I came home and got my "builder" (see below) to finish the one he had started for me.

The builder.

That's how gardening works.  You ebb and flow and you encourage each other.  Here's how my new tomato "raised bed" looks today:

Tomato bed behind the deck; empty pot waiting to be refilled

While it's not exactly a "raised bed," by true gardening definitions, my builder framed it beautifully and now my tomato plants are growing vicariously in their own little home.  Thank you Sonya for lighting our fire!

Here are a few more pictures from my backyard that I took this morning before the Georgia sweltering heat set in.  (Ignore the white fence; it belongs to my neighbor!)

 

Cucs beginning to take off.

Pond & waterfall; cucs (permanent) trellis the builder made last year.

Sunflower bed (mammoths); Impatiens bed in front of pond-Donald keeping guard

Thanks for indulging me today!  Maybe the next gardening post will show you our new rose bed (yes, twitter friends, I'm keeping up with you!) and the conversion of an old flower bed into something new!