Another Home Improvement Project of a Greener Kind

I love and appreciate flowers but I don't exactly have a green thumb. It's not a brown thumb either, mostly it's just a "too busy to remember to water the flowers so they wild and die" kind of a thumb. Hey, I'm trying to improve. Gardening is actually something I'd like to get in to at some point. Today's goal was simply to beautify the back patio so that when we have people over for a barbecue on Saturday they won't be treated to a grouping of lovely flower pots with nothing but dirt and dead things in them.

Yikes. I really need to do better.

So this morning the kids and I loaded into the van and drove the entire mile to Walmart to have the van's oil changed while we picked out flowers. It's called multi-tasking and it's a beautiful thing. Somehow oil changes have become part of my job description because David even has me take his car in. I don't mind because I generally leave the kids with him while I do it and I get 45 minutes to read a magazine in peace. I don't think he realizes how great that is or he'd be taking both the car's oil changes over!

But I digress. Back to picking out flowers at Walmart. Since we were there early in the day on a Thursday we were the only customers wandering out and I was able to get some good help from the three employees working this morning. The main thing I wanted to know was what flowers I could buy that the deer wouldn't eat in 2 seconds which I realize is an almost impossible request. I had already scooped up some marigolds and was recommended verbana and zinnias. I bought some lobelia and allysum as fillers hoping against hope that the deer will leave it alone if they're next to a stinky marigold.

I'm going to have a cow if I find my beautiful flowers looking like my poor tulips (which are planted three feet from the big neighborhood mail box so nowhere near the back yard!). Last year the tulips lasted until right before they bloomed before the deer ate them which really burned my biscuits. They were so close!

Poor things. They don't stand a chance.

Once we got home my helpers did their best to copy me and delighted in using the shovel. Grace gave it a go but Ethan really delighted in trying to shovel the awful clay soil from our yard into my poor pots. Thanks for the help little guy. Notice that he didn't drop his ball to play in the dirt. He's pretty attached to balls and gets really mad when we leave the house and I don't let him take a ball with him in the car. I mean MAD!

So here's the final result. Such an improvement! Now it's time to pray the deer leave my poor flowers alone.