Friday, April 24, 2009

I LOVE MY NEW MULCH!


There's really nothing of value to say here. I just love my newly mulched beds at the front of my house!
I was kind of going for a Japanese feel to our plant choices when we first landscaped this area. It was inspired by the two gangly rhododendron that refused to come out of the ground, even when lassoed with chains and pulled by a truck. Since we had to give up moving them, I decided they had a bonsai flair about them, so I surrounded them with low growing complementary plants with silver and burgandy colors to them, like Japanese Barberry, Blue Star Junipers, and a Cutleaf Japanese Maple tree.



I REALLY wanted an authentic stone lantern to finish the look, but hey - you can't be $30 at Bed, Bath and Beyond for a fake one. It's even got a solar powered light in there! The grass is blue sedge, and the burgandy creeper in front of it is called Voodoo Stonecrop.






This is my show-stopper spring perennial flower on the front walkway called "Helleborus" or Lenten Rose. Everybody loves these guys and they are so easy to grow. They are a perennial evergreen for part to full shade areas, and the prickly leaves make them deer resistant. In my zone 6, they start blooming in March and are in full swing by April. Eventually the flowers fade to a pretty dusky green color.


































The purpose of this bed is to hide the various septic pump equipment, like the lid to the tank and weird pipes and stuff. I made this my pink and blue bed, although it's too early in spring to really know that at this point. The main features are the three hydrangeas in the middle, along with some dicentra ("bleeding hearts"), astillbe, spirea, columbine and some grasses. This bed actually looks better now, since Tom, my official workhorse, has since edged all around it.












These are baby astillbe, which look kind of like furry snakes - surrounded, of course, by my gorgeous mulch.








Last but not least is my 173 Brunswick Pike memorial bed, replicating the garden I had in my very first house either by flat out stealing the original plants (it was a long 9 months before that thing sold) or finding the exact same plants already in place at the new pad. And just like at my old house, I still can't get anything but weeds to grow up that damn trellis. When this bed grows up more, it will have lots of shade friendly plants, since I seemed to have absolutely no sun where I used to live. Some good shade perennials here are lungwort, Jacob's ladder and dead nettle.

And now for the final tie-in .... doesn't my mulch look great?!?!?
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The Big Bad Blog Beginning: Marketing Gone Awry

So awhile back, I was talking to my home business and web marketing diva. I know what you're thinking right now. You're thinking, "Big deal! Everybody has a home business and web marketing diva." Maybe so, but if you're not talking to Dina at http://www.wordfeeder.com/, then you've got the wrong gal.

Since I have the right gal, Dina said, "You should start a blog to help promote your website."

"Really? How come?"

She then said something along the lines of "Hoogety boogety search engine optimization foogety moogety page hierarchy loogety toot toot meta-tags and strategic links...." and many other extremely smart things. Please keep in mind Dina has never actually said "hoogety boogety" to me in any context. What she did do was give me a brief explanation of web marketing that made complete sense, but the wisdom of which I would completely mangle upon retelling. The relevant gist was as follows - a blog, when properly done, can be a great tool to drive traffic to my website.

I mulled this over for quite some time. Could I write clear and informative articles about the decorative painting business? Er, sure, I think. New techniques, preferred paint and brush brands, offers of free templates.....Ooh, but how bout the funny fellow painter ladies I see at my teacher's studio? Or the nutjobs who I meet at craft shows?

And then I started thinking about other humorous stuff, like the time my mother swiped HER mother's mother's day gift from me and refused to give it back. And the stories from my grandfather about the 8-10 different ways he's accidentally electrocuted himself throughout the years, and yet still stands. Or about the time I spent half a day convinced that drunk people snuck into my yard during the night and dug up 48 newly planted impatiens (until I realized a deer ate them).

That's about the point that I realized that I actually want a blog to show the world how hilarious I am, and if I can throw some web marketing in there, so be it. I can make it work. For example, the two funniest things I do are 1.) garden organically 2.) allow people to speak to me. Since I paint flowers and creatures and landscapes, does it count as web marketing if I blog about growing flowers in a landscape while shouting obscenities at creatures? You betcha! And when my mother does something bizarre, should that go in there too? Absolutely. Ah, yes. Yet another blog is born.

So in the end, I will market my website the way I organic garden - seek out the advice of experts, change it all around, and find myself continually shocked when my system doesn't work. Effective? No. Funny? Oh yes indeed! Keep reading.....