Starting Over in a New Garden: Post #1

A lot of people have expressed interest in watching me take over my new space while moving my entire garden from my previous yard.  So I will be doing a series of posts on 'Starting Over in a New Garden'.  I by no means claim to be a gardening expert...I have no training in landscape design...some people might even call aspects of my garden 'ugly'...I just do what I like.  So, if you are interested, you can follow along and watch as I blog about my adventures making the new yard my own.  Feel free to offer suggestions and advice if you desire...I am always open to new ideas.

Funny that I noticed how this flower bed looks like a heart from this angle.  I have been calling it the pac man bed.  It is one of the existing flower beds in my new yard.  It came with 2 rose bushes, if you can call them bushes.  I know next to NOTHING about roses, so I'm going to have to do some research.  Since the two roses were the only thing in the bed, I replanted my gladiator alliums here...I have two kinds of alliums, the really huge purple ones, and mid-size but still huge azure blue ones. 

I also added some regular garlic bulbs around the roses.  The roses benefit from the garlic because it will repel aphids.  Garlic also gathers sulfur in the soil, which acts as a natural fungicide and helps with disease prevention. 

This is my ponytail grass.  I don't remember if this one will come back, I think it may be an annual in my zone, but it still looks cool as heck in the garden.  I surrounded it with my recycled christmas wreath from this year.  I thought it was an interesting arrangement. 

I posted some pictures on twitter before of my newly designed sun-bed.  However, Iowa One Call people showed up and drew an offensive orange line (the phone company) right through the side of my flower bed.  I had to adjust my bricks to accommodate the line, but it worked out, because now I have a sun bed, and a separate bed for my herb garden.

This is going to be the herb garden.  I formed the shape of the bed I wanted with an extension cord (a hose works too).  When I get the shape right, I put the bricks down to more concretely mark the bed.  Sometimes, I will dig in the bricks at an angle, or stack them.  For now, they are just laying horizontally. 

I also do not remove all the sod when I make a flower bed.  I just place the plants where I want them, and then lay down a heavy layer of wet newspaper and mulch.  This keeps almost all the weeds from coming up, but still retains the benefits of keeping the sod in place.

This lovely circle is where I decided to plant my cilantro and parsley.  I am still not exactly sure what the plant is in the center, but I am just going to work around it for now.  I also have to keep the squeanies out of it.

This doesn't look like much right now, but at some point in the future it will be lots of tulips, crocus, and daffodils.  I dug the mulch back and put all the bulbs underneath...I'm not sure if I will get any blooms this year, but next year I will for sure. 

This bed was created for lots of viney and trellisy things.  I plan on having 3 kinds of cucumbers, green beans, and probably my nasturtiums here.  In front, there will be perennials and annuals. 

My son got out the chalks.  This is about how I felt after all that digging.  This weekend is bound to have more digging in store....in fact, I see digging in my future for the next several weeks.  That's okay, though, when you are starting over in a new garden, digging is the name of the game.  Have you ever had to start completely over in your garden?