A pig with attitude has finally found his permanent home after three years of collecting dust on my work table within the garage. He had to wait until my general contractor returned to finish up my home’s final phase of restoration. Of all the fun weathervane options, he was by far my favorite. The website that I purchased him from is no longer up and running, but I did manage to find another site with the exact same pig and many other well-crafted options. Eventually I will take a photo from the front of my garage. Today the doors were dismantled and hauled off to be repaired causing the front view to look rather pitiful.
The backyard garden’s construction documents are complete and my landscape architect, Michael Parkey, will now send them out to bid. Perhaps in two weeks the construction will begin and my poor neighbors will no longer have to deal with the view of my trailer-park-of-a backyard.
I have also ordered the fancy lace chain link fence that I wrote about in a previous post. It’s due to ship from India next week. Trying to find someone to deal with all the paperwork involved with getting this chain link fabric cleared through customs has been one giant pain in the derrière. This product has been designed in the Netherlands, fabricated in India, and will be shipped by sea. The Dutch design firm informed me that I would be responsible for locating the nearest deep sea port and arranging for its unloading, customs clearance, and shipping to Dallas. Three weeks later I now have the knowledge and skills to import anything from anywhere. Skills that I could add to my résumé, but won’t, because I never want to do this again. Ever.
I will be posting the different phases of my backyard’s transformation throughout this summer. So stay tuned. If you can’t remember what the hardscape plan looks like, refer to my past post found here.
Summer annuals for the front shade garden. Most of what’s on my list are now available at the local nurseries, and I wasted no time in snapping them up. Waiting for absolutely every thing to be available before buying is a big mistake in my opinion. The longer plants sit around the nursery crammed in their original shipping flats, the more scraggy and picked over they become. For the most part I buy complete flats, because there’s usually a discount once you exceed a minimum quantity. And I don’t search out the cheapest deal in order to save a few dollars. Those deals may or may not exist in nurseries that take considerable time and gas to get to. That’s crazy and just not worth it. So most of my annuals are found at Nicholson-Hardie, and a few are found at Jackson Home & Garden. I prefer to buy from nurseries who stock plants produced by local growers. When a plant has been cultivated in your hometown’s soil and climate, there’s a better chance of success.
