Free Garden Makeover

It's easy to get frustrated with your garden when you don't have any money to work with but a great way to get around that is to walk through your garden plant catalog in hand and circle the things that you do have. You may be surprised and how expensive some of those plants would be if you had to go out and buy them.

I had a lot of white violas and I was surprised to find out they'd have cost me between 8.95 and 12.95 per plant if I'd had to buy them.

Mixed in with the violas I've got hundreds of lily of the valley plants that I'll be doing another project with.

 
My first plan was to use them in containers with some lily of the valley plants in the center for height and interest.

As I filled one pot after another I realized that there were enough of them to plant as a row along the edge of my path in the front of the garden and make things really look welcoming from the street. We'll see which of these ideas wins with my family. If there's digging to be done I'll have to depend on them for that.

It's a good thing that I didn't have them put in the ground right away. We had a surprise snow a few days later and a stretch of cold weather so I had the pots brought in the house while the flowers bloomed.

Unfortunately by the time I took this last batch of photos I'd already clipped the flowers and put them into my indoor butterfly habitat.

No matter what the weather does I'm having spring in my heart and my home.

As you can see they've grown quite a bit already.

The weather finally warmed up the violets in the yard are in bloom.

The ones in the pots were put in around other pots on the patio.

I planted this urn with a small maple tree at the center and lily of the valley and hosta in the middle then finished it off with the white violets around the outside edge. The reason the urn is sitting on that small table instead of on the side of the covered bench was because we'd painted it from blue to white so that it match the patio furniture and form part of the structure for the container garden.

The lovely thing about this is that it's just the right size to fill a gap between our place and the neighbors and offer a bit of privacy once the plants get bigger.