I Promised Me a Shade Garden...

While washing the windows and trimming the insane amount of sticker bushes around here Saturday, I had an overwhelming notion come over me to create some type of shade garden in the area around the oak trees at the back of the yard where Brisco Darling likes to dirty up his pretty little paws digging for critters.  An area that suddenly became much larger once I was in there pulling weeds and raking the hundreds of pounds of leaves that were still piled up along the edge of the fence.  


As I've mentioned before I am not much of a planner and I lack patience so I tend to jump into projects all Gung ho and full throttle without so much as taking a measurement or sketching a draft.  My idea of planning consisted of pinning a few pics on Pinterest for inspiration...

and then hopping in the car for Lowe's after the boys were at school yesterday morning in order to load my car down with plants that, according to their description tags, thrive in shady areas.


Then I set out to clean the area.  My idea was to first clear out all the leaves that had gathered against the fence and haul them out of the gate to the woods with the wheelbarrow.  Ha!  That clearly wasn't going to happen since that would have been like two hundred and seventy six loads and only one of me. So I settled for raking them into pile after pile after pile and attempted to begin moving the big rocks the previous owners had at some point, for reasons unbeknownst to me, stacked up in piles.  


Y'all. Pilates and Zumba ain't got nothing on that kind of manual labor.  I was panting, gasping for breath, having dizzy spells, sweating profusely and cursing every single stone I turned until I was forced to break for my two school pick ups and the buying of groceries in between.  


And when Devin and I were putting away the groceries, Dracen walks out of the bathroom from where he was doing his business, pants around his ankles (lucky for us, his shirt was kinda long),  and demands to know who turned out the lights.  As it turns out the power had gone out because, according to Popaw, a police chase ended in the taking out of a power pole and several lines in town. 


Assuming it would be back on soon, I headed back out the door to move some more rocks until Charlie came home, had mercy on me, and got a big tarp in order to get all the leaves out of my future shade garden and then helped me move the rocks I had earlier proclaimed "unmovable" while Dracen kept popping out of the back door in fits because Devin had...Devin did...Devin said... No power in the house and they STILL wouldn't come outside.  


I continued to busy myself until the rain rolled in around 7pm at which point I came inside wanting nothing more than to get in the shower and wash all the dirt and sweat off and then flop down on the couch and watch the final competition on Dancing With the Stars which was all in fact impossible seeing as how we had no electricity and televisions and well pumps don't work without electricity.  Not cool, Speedy Gonzalez.  Not cool at all.   


Around 8:30 we hopped in the car to go see what we could see and sure enough there they were, just in front of the Auto Zone, oodles of power trucks and workers diligently working to restore our power that Speedy took out, as it poured down rain on their poor souls.  And that's when I quit my bitchin' and came back home to read by flashlight until just before 10pm when alas, there once again was light.  And t.v. And running water.  


And today, although I feel like I worked each and every machine in the gym several times over, the shade garden quest must go on.


To be continued...