God's green thumb

I kill plants. Every.single.one. Houseplants, that is. When plants are solely my responsibility, they are goners. However, if they are out in the yard and God can help, with His great green thumb, then my plants live. And, sometimes, they actually look OK.

These are pictures of my immature, still pretty early in the season, alley gardens. This is just the second year of their existence. Previously, one side of the garage was a complete disaster zone (top photo). We had neighbors who used this area as a dumping ground. I would call it a compost, but that's being generous with the language. It was a dump. The most noxious weeds and unidentified flora grew here with wild abandon.

Then our neighbors tore down their almost-falling-down garage and built a brand-new two-car garage AND they moved. Since these neighbors moved, the house has changed hands two times. The current new owners of the house want to work with me to create a "community garden" (I hope they mean neighbor garden and not community!) They even brought in some top soil (as you can see on the right hand side of the top picture).

Yipee!

Then they asked me to consult on creating their gardens since mine were "so beautiful." I actually laughed out loud when they said this. I just threw stuff in the garden, most of it hand-me-downs from friends and family, and had no "plan." (Any garden book advises against this approach!) I did "plan" a garden this year on the west side of the house and bought all the plants for it at the Friends Plant Sale, but these alley gardens are just an attempt to beautify what was a neglected, and even ugly, area. Now that I've been doing this all of a year or so, seasoned vet that I am, I'll try to enhance the random and impulsive nature of the gardens. It might require a complete re-do. But, that isn't happening this year!