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.

Random bits and things.

It's seems like there are so many things taking up the hours of my days lately. Not just the kids but all the running around. Then I still have to do all the laundry that never seems to end and let's not forget about those dishes. I can't bear to think about them.

I have had these last four boxes just sitting in my dining room. I intentionally left them there because I knew they would drive me crazy looking at them until they were unpacked. Instead, they seem to have became part of the furniture in the room. They don't exactly match my formal dining room or my china and crystal ware, but still they remained. So I finally opened them up to unpack them and was able to get throughtwo of them without a problem. It's those last two that are still sitting there that I don't know what to do with. It's funny how I just don't have the right place to put these items. They are more of decorations than anything else but I still can't find the right place. So still they sit in my dining room.

The same thing seems to be happening with all the window treatments. They have sat in the office waiting to be hung for two months now. And finally today I washed them and ironed them and got ready to hang them. It's then that I realized the new windows are much to big for the old treatments. So that means I must now go shopping for new ones. Not really a big deal for the boys room but the girls rooms had some really cute ones that I'm hoping to find extra off. But in the meantime they will just have to go without for a while longer. I don't think they really noticed at all so it's not to much of a big deal.

And I must also admit that I've been spending a bit more time reading than blogging lately. But I can't really feel to bad for that. I feel like it's been ages since I had time to read and am enjoying it. So that's where I've been for the last few days. Nothing big or fun or important going on that's even all that exciting or worth mentioning. So that makes it a bit harder for me to come up with anything worthwhile to write about.