The Retreat in Progress

Creating the Retreat

 May 4, 2011

I found these neat gardening blogs that had beautiful pictures of flowers and foilage and they inspired me to pick up the camera my parents gave me for Christmas and see what I could do.

However, the blogs that inspired me to get out in the Texas heat and work on my Retreat are the ones that had pictures of how they put hard work into their garden and how the garden progressed over the years.  So, I am sharing the progression of my garden retreat, but I am still going to take pictures of flowers.

I have a huge backyard with a chainlink fence.  My son and I constructed a long stretch of a flowerbed last year along the back.  Weeds continually came up in the flowerbed and almost took over the plants that we planted.  

This is a section of the flowerbed that we worked on last weekend.  We are laying down very thick layers of newspapers (thanks to coworkers for the donations) and putting a thick layer of mulch on top. I can't wait until next spring when the crepe myrtle and carolina jasmine have grown and give the bed some character and a little privacy from the neighbors.




My son also constructed a bottle tree for me.  We will add more lag screws once I get some prettier bottles to display.