Today is the first day of my annual gardening vacation! It was chilly this morning, so I bided my time writing and waiting for the nursery to open. I showed up promptly at 9am. I was the first customer there.
Today was a day to buy supplies — dirt, flower box liners, fertilizer — which meant a trip to the nursery. Which, of course, meant I’d come home with a car full of plants.
I was excited to see a bunch of perennials from my list already available at my local nursery, the Crow’s Nest, and especially a Miss Ruby butterfly bush: the magenta butterfly magnet that’s to be the centerpiece of the flower bed by my garden chair. My purchases on Day One included:
- pansies for the flower boxes
- Miss Ruby butterfly bush
- white veronica
- pink veronica
- Russian sage

After adding new coconut liners to the flower boxes, replacing the soil, and filling them with fresh pansies and purple kale, I spent all day today moving plants around. In order to plant the front beds according to my plans, I needed to clear all of the current plants out. I moved the lilac from the front bed to the herb bed. I moved sedums, salvias, milkweed, and Echinacea from the front bed to the back.
Digging holes on the hill is back-breaking work. Under the dead grass is gravel and rock, and shoveling through gravel and on a steep slope is ugly. It’s a good thing most of these plants are drought tolerant. Still, I worry about their survival. It was a lot of work to move them. I hope they do okay.

Today was about a 6-7 hour day, and I haven’t even touched the mulch. Tomorrow I’ll finish moving plants around and start working on the herb bed.