After the 5K yesterday, I came home and spent 3 hours working in the yard with Jose. After quickly finishing up the final bits of mulching in the front, we moved to the back to plant a few things we got on Friday night.
The crape myrtle was already there from last fall, but the others are new. There are three hibiscus plants on the left and a white oleander on the right.
I looooove hisbiscus and took all these photos while the plants were still sitting in their pots on the back patio. The best part is that they bloom all summer long!
The oleander actually replaced a hibiscus that we planted last fall that didn’t survive the winter. I’m hopeful that these will have a better chance since they have all summer to get established, but even if they die of cold it’ll be worth it to have them this year. I love them.
You may notice there are only 4 plants there despite my saying we spent 3 hours in the yard. There’s one more out of frame which makes five but still: it took 2+ hours to plant 5 things. Do you know how hard it is to dig a large enough hole when:
- You have to sever layers of tough, viney St. Augustine grass,
- You have to dig into super-packed, super-hard clay, and
- The ground is super dry because it hasn’t rained more than a 5-minute drizzle in months?
Ugh. Even taking turns, Jose and I were both exhausted by the time we finished digging all those dang holes.
Here’s the fifth item, a grapevine that Jose chose. I’m calling it our “experimental” plant. It’ll be cool if it actually produces grapes!
This is the satsuma tree we planted last fall. It had a rough time with the couple freezes we had in February and lost a ton of leaves. I wasn’t sure it was going to survive, but it has bounced back nicely. It flowered a few weeks ago but dropped most of the tiny proto-satsumas. That’s ok since we were already planning to prune the fruit off this year since the tree is still so small.
I don’t usually mind yardwork but after digging all those holes and planting everything, we were both starving and exhausted. Even if I hadn’t run the 5K in the morning, this would have counted as our exercise for the day!
