A (Not So Lazy) Sunday Afternoon

In fact, it was a very busy one for me.  I built a new garden bed!

I had been wanting to extend one bed for a while, and since I'd bought some plants the other weekend, I decided I might as well get on with it.

First, I got to with my tiller - once I got it started, that is.  I was trying to be diligent and take good care of it, but I got a bit carried away with the amount of oil I put in it.  After many, many attempted starts, some minor swear words, and cleaning up a whole lot of excess oil, it blew smoke everywhere and then settled down to the task at hand.

And a new bed is born!  There was a lot of grass to be raked out of it, but that all ended up in the compost bin.  No doubt there will be bits of grass that I missed poking up for months to come. So far, so good.

Next, I dumped some rocks in there:

The rocks were recycled from a footpath that we used to have running from the back door to the back of the yard (we now have a bit of a cow path of smooshed lawn), and some that we stole borrowed from the desert south of here.  It's all lava rock.  It's not technically a rock garden, because it doesn't have tons of rocks in great big piles everywhere, and it isn't very tall, so I'm going to call it my Desert Rock Bed.

The plants I bought are all drought tolerant, and quite a few of them are Idaho natives, or native to the region.  People here are slowly starting to catch on to the idea of native gardens.  Yay!  This bed is in full sun and doesn't get much of the flood irrigation during irrigation season, so it made perfect sense to go native, as it were.

Some digging, more raking, a few more rocks, a little bit of compost and a lot of water to get them started, and I was done!  There's even a footpath in there so I can get to all parts of the bed as needed.

Apologies for the quality of the photos; the sun was quite harsh and I'm discovering that taking decent photos of a garden bed (as opposed to a single plant) is really quite difficult.  That, and my arms were a little wobbly from all the rock lifting! 

The plants had all perked up by this morning.  I can't wait until they start to grow and fill the space in.

Here's the list of what I planted if you're interested (sorry, I don't have the botanical names):
Showy Fleabane
Dwarf Culinary Sage
Mountain Blue Grass
Partridge Feathers
Kinnick-Kinnick
Coreposis (I transplanted that from elsewhere in the garden)

If you want to learn more about them, here's the nursery I bought them from: Draggin' Wing Farm

I'm feeling a bit sore and sorry for myself today, but it was totally worth it!