Raised Flower Bed

Hello long lost bloggers.. It's been a while.. I've been busy, to say the least. Working 2 jobs, living with my college student husband (who just graduated June 14 - woohoo!!) current change of jobs, raising our 4 fur-babies, and blogging wedding on my work blog, MonogramWedding & of course the usual house projects and upkeep. Holy Moly! Things seem to be calming down a little bit and I can finally breath and get some sleep, and now catch up on some blogging!

If anyone knows me, you might know that I am a little impatient. When I want something done, I want it done, now! Which could be why in the heart of "spring showers" I was creating a raised flower bed along our back fence and traipsing through our swamp of a yard with buckets of sand and dirt (because it was too wet to use a wheel barrow) and hauling by hand arm fulls of slate for the retaining wall. Looking back, I probably could have waited a month, or 2, but I got it done and absolutely LOVE it! I can't believe we had NOTHING along our back fence before. {I completed this project in April}

{our yard is clay, so until it stops raining for about a month, our entire backyard is a swamp! Thank goodness for rainboots!}

Our street flooded back in January, it was the craziest weirdest thing. Our whole street was like a river. We literally had neighbors boating by.. the water got as high as our front yard so we went out and got free sand bags, just in case. Thankfully the water never got to the house, but it was scary! I used the sand bags from that to build up my base for my raised bed. I left the sand in the bags and lined the fence. Then I went to a sand bag drop zone and got more loose sand to put on top, then added dirt. I got my plants from Leon Nursery in Sherwood. They had a Groupon for $19 for $40 worth of plants. I had $10 in Groupon bucks so I got the deal for $9! I ended up spending $57, but since I had the Groupon, it was really only $26 total! What a deal for my pretty new plants! The slate retaining wall was made from free slate we got last spring from a good friend {remember this post?} The rock path in front was created last weekend by my mom when we did a major yard makeover! {more on what we did coming soon!}

My mom also planted some Clematis which hopefully will grow up the fence! I LOVE how the whole thing turned out and enjoy looking out our kitchen window and seeing some color!