Gay Goblins

So it snowed on Thursday, so you know what that means!

It means it's time to do some spring planting. This corner of the yard at the end of my motorcycle parking pad used to house a half-rotten maple tree. I got it cut down and the stump ground out I guess a few years ago now, and that made for some fantastically fertile soil here.

But it's just been sitting there under a blanket of mulch ever since then while I waited for the ground up stump bits to decompose.

Well, I decided that today would be the day to actually plant something here, finally.

To start off with, there's this Japanese Boxwood.

I had initially planned to get some cherry laurel as a test run for planting some against the back fence, but they didn't have any in stock. I had a little browse around and almost grabbed some black stem pittosporum but they only had those in the larger size which would have cost about $45 each vs the $15 for these boxwood. Since I wasn't in a rush to get a lot of growth here, the smaller size made a lot more sense.

These boxwood are up against the north side of a fence, so I'm expecting that the foliage along the bottom will eventually thin out and die back, so to help fill in below it, I got this plant.

It's a Gay Goblin Pieris. Which is a varietal name that I don't think someone would come up with these days. But I dunno, I'm not a botanist.

Anyway, this corner should fill in nicely, and in a few years the boxwood should give my motorcycles a bit more shade.

Possibly quite a few years, the boxwood is apparently pretty slow growing.

While I was out plant shopping, I also got a few more lantana to replace the ones that died from the frost, again.

There's two in the back along the sidewalk, and two in the front along the driveway, plus one right between them, the sole survivor that has made it through two winters without succumbing to the frost. These stupid lantana just have to survive one winter to get themselves established enough to keep from completely dying every year, and one of these years they're going to make it.

Until then, it's a good thing they're cheap.