Last year J built a big planter area on the side of the house using pallets and cedar strips including a stair and we filled it with plants. This spring he looked at the planters and decided they sucked and ripped it all out, haha. He has gone to work building a new set up and already it is looking great.

There was a huge pile of old deck boards at my Dad’s new property that he didn’t want so we brought them over to our place and will put them to use.

Today J cut the boards down and covered the small deck he framed out a few weeks ago and did the two top steps. We found a home for one of our new rain barrels and the recessed planter we installed looks even better than it did before!

We relocated a lot of our plants from the old planters and into two new ones at the top now that this area is deer proofed and safe. Since moving the plants they have grown like crazy! In this bed we have some anemones (off cuts from a friend’s garden last year), wolfs bane (more off cuts), valeriana, hollyhocks, cardoon artichoke, motherwort, comfrey, and calendula. In the bed next to it we moved all our raspberries.

In the triangular bed we have a sword fern, some dock, echinacea, lungwort, hearts tongue and a tatting fern. In the bed above we have some specially bred mini rhododendrons with blue flowers that were modified on Gabriola, along with some small candy stripe phlox and a couple stray borage plants that sprouted up in the sand near where they were planted last year.

In place of the planters and walkways we tried out last year we have done some tiered landscaping utilizing rocks from around the property, and J has chosen some nice shrubs to add to the ones we rescued from around the property. There is an elderberry and a flowering currant and we are thinking we’d like to add more currants, blueberries and goji berries to this area, along with some mahogany hibiscus and amaranth for colour. Gardening is fun!