Your weed, my flower!

My love of the outdoors and landscaping started when I was very young.  My family lived on a ranch and the front yard had an old wagon that had once been a flower garden.  At the age of seven I would come home from school and work on transforming that old wagon into a beautiful flower garden.  I racked and shoveled for hours on it. 

I have found that same love at my own home, but it took a while!

Reason:  Like I said, I love working outside and was thrilled to have lots of acreage to beautify, but after our first year here we lost three trees from a late freeze, along with early freezes, grasshoppers, drought and wind I joined the bandwagon of disliking landscaping in Doney Park.

We kept putting in gardens with hope, faith and determination to succeed and sure enough in our forth year we have reap the rewards of patience.  Instead of putting in tomatoes early and being disappointed that they freeze and die we start them inside and focus on the carrots, lettuce, strawberries, and onions.  This year all of our plants look so much healthier with the addition of steer manure and monsoon rains.  Many of our plants we have grown from seed that we dried from last year and I think that really makes the plants hardy.

 So I think we finally got the gardening under our belt, but I really want a nice yard of flowers, trees and grass.  Again, I had been under the mindset that it is not possible in Doney Park.  Well after meeting with a friend in the ward I realized that many peoples weeds are flowers, just out of place!  Novel Idea! I started looking around our house and realized we had many plants that were beautiful just not maintained or in one place. 

 Well, since my enlightening moment I have transplanted many many plants from the yard to flower beds. After doing so I started doing my research and found many of these flowers and shrubs people buy at the store.These natural plants included columbine, sunflowers, holyhocks, firs, penstomen, sage, iris, larkspur, and yellow mustard.  I have about seven others that I have found out back that are beautiful but I do not have a name for them.

 It has been so rewarding to watch these plants flourish since they are native to flagstaff or at least have survived Flagstaff climate without help. Once the plants mature we are going to have an oasis.

 Another project I have been working on is homemade sod.  I have always wanted a big green beautiful lawn but it is quite expensive.  So I have set to work to make what we have beautiful.  I have been digging up grass from my flower beds and transplanting them to the yard.  It is working quite well and getting greener by the monsoon storm.  After three years of pulling weeds we finally have a 20x20 area that is thick and green. 

If you spot me eyeing some weeds (flowers) in your yard by the side of the road please be kind and let take them :)