Transplants and Fruit Basket Turnover

We had a busy weekend.  Because of my husband's line of work, our "weekend" isn't always the real end of the week.  We have to squeeze in big projects when we can.  The biggest project we had this week was transplanting plants.

Last spring, two years after we built our home, we had finally saved enough money to landscape our yard.  My husband used to work on a landscape crew so we knew we could do the work ourselves to save a lot of money (Well, we thought we could, but that is another story!).  I designed what I wanted, Bill liked it, and he got busy working on it.  He did a wonderful job following my plans!  I can't begin to tell you the amount of time we spent working on our new yard, but it was all worth it!  This was the first real yard we have ever had.

Well, last school year the children and I had to live out of town during the week because the drive to my job was so long.  When I would come home there was lots to be done, and the flowers were never a top priority.  The weeds and ants quickly got ahead of me, and I just simply couldn't catch back up during the summer in our blazing heat, swarming gnats, and biting flies.  The weeds here have to be the fastest growing on the planet.  Sometimes I'm quite sure we live in the jungle instead of Georgia!  Bill said he would just tear everything out and toss it to re-plant with something that required less maintenance.  In the last few weeks, the plants that survived our very mild winter started coming back, and were so pretty despite all the ugly weeds.  The thought of just throwing them away simply depressed me.  I asked him if we could just transplant the surviving plants from four of the nine beds to one of our other beds. (I had to ask him, because I have never had flowers before and know very little about taking care of them.  I am a city girl that has ended up in the country!  I'm learning though!)  He felt like we could so we got busy.  I felt so much better knowing we were not throwing away time and money! 

I hope this gives someone else inspiration to not give up on their flowers!  Some of the most seemingly impossible beds to recover, can be salvaged with a lot of hard work and patience.  You wouldn't believe what my beds used to look like!  Well, maybe if I show you what some of my other beds look like now, you can imagine.  The beds that we were able to salvage didn't look quite so bad, but they were still quite a mess!  These are the beds I just gave up on and let go at the end of summer/early fall.  This is so embarressing, but I hope it gives someone else hope to keep trying!  I will do another post in a couple of weeks when we replant these beds.

The kids had such a good time helping and playing outside all day when we transferred the plants!

This is most of our finished project.

These are two of the five salvaged beds.  I wish I had a before picture.

One of the smaller projects I had to do over the weekend was to make a spot in my kitchen for our new convection oven.  Bill has been saying we really need one to avoid heating up the house so much during our incredibly hot summers, and it runs off of less electricity . ( You know he had to just twist my arm to get me to agree!  heehee!)  I have been doing a lot more cooking in our big oven since leaving my job, and the oven keeps the house warm.  We can only imagine what would happen to our electric bill in the summer with the air running constantly trying to cool the house back down.  That is a near impossible job in the summer once the house gets warm!  So, to prepare a spot for the new oven, I had to move my coffee station to it's new location.  In order to do that, I had to clean out my spice cabinet and a junk drawer so that I could put my spices in the wasted junk drawer.  Fruit basket turnover!  I love cleaning out and organizing new spaces!  This picture is a before and after.

I still have to finish labeling my spice lids so they can be identified easily without pulling the bottles out one at a time.

So, there is my weekend in a nutshell.  I would love to hear the projects you have planned for your home!

Not every post will have a moral, but how can this one not?!

The moral of the story:  Our hearts and lives are like flower beds and junk drawers.  If they are not guarded closely, they can easily be wasted and ruined.  Don't wait too late.  Jesus offers a free cleaning service.  All we have to do is accept the offer.