How Does your Garden Grow?

As you might recall, I'm not exactly known for my green thumb. I've written about my weak attempts at gardening a few times, but most of my attempts have ended in a big, fat FAIL. Regardless of my less-than-fortunate luck, I decided to clean out and redo the garden in our front yard. I originally wrote about the project in this post and then updated a few days later with these after pictures.

Here is what the yard looked like after I dug up the old shrubs and cleaned up the dead leaves:

After a weekend of digging, planting and mulching, I ended up with this:

It's been exactly one month since I last updated you, so I bet you're just dying to know if anything survived. You are? Well then consider this your lucky day! :)

Let's start with the Celosias. These flowers are amazing! I love their vibrance, and the best part is that their blooming season can last up to 3 months. Here's what they look like now - still going strong!

The new shrub that we bought - to replace the dead shrubs - is called Japanese Euonymus. I was worried that I didn't bury the roots deep enough in the ground, but it appears to be doing alright, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

The last thing I planted were the Impatients, which weren't quite blooming when I bought them. I knew I'd have to water everything pretty frequently if I wanted them to bloom, but I won't lie, I skipped several days of watering this month. If it weren't for a very rainy June, all of the Impatients would probably be dead right now. Thank you June for helping me water my needy little Impatients!

When I originally picked out the Impatients, I decided that I wanted all white so they wouldn't compete with the very vibrant Celosias. I was really happy to watch the white Impatients coming in, but one day when I came home from work, I saw this ....

Ummmm ... that doesn't look white to me! As it turns out, one of the containers had red Impatients. No big deal, right? I decided I was lucky that the red one was all the way in the back, making it much less noticeable.

So I kept watering it kept raining on the impatients and I kept watching the little white blooms pop-up.

And then just a few days ago, I looked over at my garden and saw this:

Doh! As it turns out, I also picked up a pack of violet Impatients. :)

So here's my best attempt at staying positive and making myself feel better about my mistake.

I'm lucky that all of these flowers have lasted as long as they have, and in most aspects of my life I live by the motto "the more, the merrier," so it looks like that will be my new gardening motto, too.

Bring it on multi-colored Impatients - the more, the merrier!

How does your garden grow? Do you try to coordinate everything to create a cohesive look, or do you plant everything before it blooms without much thought to the color? While I tried to lay out a plan for our front yard, I've had just as much fun finding little colored surprises whenever I come home from work!

This post is linked up to HOUSEography's Room-by-Room party: