House of Bennetts

The front of our house for a while looked like this, with the green shutters and the awkward garden bed.

Then we had the fence installed and the shutters and trim painted.

Awkward garden bed remained.

But this was the plan:

yard

A few weeks ago we had some lovely yard folks clear out the garden bed, expand it to be parallel with the front porch, and rototiller in about 10 bags of compost to amend the soil. They failed to remove all of the tree roots from the VERY large tree nearby, which made the digging of holes ROUGH.

I then went with a co-worker of mine to pick out plants for the front bed and thank the sweet baby Jesus that we had his help. He worked his tail off helping us... LB almost died pushing this cart without the benefit of vision.

We got home and my co-worker and I spaced everything out on the weed blocker goodness that our yard guys had put down.

I did too much that weekend...

...but we got everything in and two weeks later, EVERYTHING IS STILL ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's a miracle!

We planted everything and then went to get soaker hoses. In hindsight, I probably would have opted for spray soaker hoses so that we wouldn't have to be soooooo careful about where to try to bury them. But we are doing soaker hoses for about an hour at night and then a quick spray watering as well.

We also just got about 20 bags of mulch from Home Depot, LB spread it all around, and we called it a day.

I am quite happy with my new view from the front porch.

As fall and winter come, I have no idea what I am supposed to do/not do, so let's just hope I can keep these babies alive.

Momma Mary died all of these coffee filters and sent them on over to me to make flowers. So Katie and I went and got:

Floral Wire
Floral Tape
Wire cutters
These floral sticks for the "stems"

We started by taking a stack of 6-8 coffee filters and cutting a piece of floral wire about 6 inches long. We then poked two holes through all of the filters using the floral wire-- the holes were about an inch or two apart. We poked it through one side and back down the other to create a little "loop" on what would be the top of the flower. The place where you started your poke with one end of the wire is now the bottom of the flower. We then used a pen to poke a hole through the bottom (where the ends of the wire you just looped up are dangling) through the filters to the middle of the "loop" on the top of the flower.

We then took the floral sticks shown above to stick through the bottom about an inch into the top. You then mess with the floral wire and the floral sticks to make the stick stay in the flower. Then, wrap the stick with the wire. At that point, you want to start scrunching the filters up one by one...

Use the floral tape to tape the bottom of the flower, the stick and the wire together. Typically, you can get the flower to stand up straighter with more floral tape (especially on the base of the flower/on the coffee filters) and shifting the wire around. In the end they should look like this: