Not a Ligustrum Lover

What's a Ligustrum. It's a very cheap and inexpensive evergreen shrub/tree that the builders like to use. So they planted six of these things in front of my dining room windows. I don't care much for them. They have absolutely no shape to them until they get really big. And by really big I mean over twenty feet+ tall. You can keep them as a shrub if your willing to trim them about every ten days or so (yes that is a slight exaggeration) but they are really way to much work for what you get. So as you can see they are terrible to plant in front of any window, let alone mine and then you have six of them on top of that. So I decided that today was the day to dig them up. I went ahead and bought some dwarf holly bushes and some miniature rose bushes to plant there instead. Both are nice and poky for being in front of the window area. And when they are full size, they will never grow so tall as to obscure my view. So here is my before picture.

See how ugly they are, they just do nothing for me.


Now here they are lying in the back yard until I decide if I'm going to get rid of them or let Hubs do it. I'm leaning toward letting Hubs do it since technically I did the hard part of digging them up.


R.I.P. Ligustrums I'm sorry you weren't appreciated by your owners as you deserved to be.

The one thing I definitely found out while I was digging these suckers up and then replanting the Holly and Rose bushes is that my front flower bed is nothing but clay. I went through close to fifty pounds of potting soil just getting these things in the ground and giving them half a chance at survival. Well OK, maybe not fifty pounds but close enough.

So that now has me rethinking all my flower planting plans. Because anything I do in that flower bed is going to involve clay and lots of it. Which means lots more potting soil and lots more work on my part. And I hate to admit it, but I'm a lazy gardener. I don't like having to dig out huge globs of clay and over sized rocks from the flowerbeds. That's to much like manual labor for me. Wait that is manual labor, see this is a total contrast to my lazy gardener approach I try to follow. So now I'm back to the proverbial drawing board while I decide what else to plant. I'm leaning more and more to perennials with just a few annuals now that I know how much clay there is. I'll keep you posted since I'm sure your all dying to know all about this. Then again, maybe I'll just take up container gardening...it's sounding better and better by the minute.