When the cat is away...

...this mouse gets out and does some gardening. I put my husband on a plane to Chicago this morning for a work trip. So I got outside and played in the dirt some.

We have two garden beds in our front yard. When we moved into our home, both had newly planted palm trees. Not long after, despite my best efforts to keep the palms alive, the very front ones died. We pulled those out, leaving us with this:

Lovely isn't it? I especially love the weeds. Let's pull back for a better look:

Here you can see how nicely our brown stucco blends with our dead brown lawn. To be honest, we aren't planning on putting real grass in the front, we figure we use enough water in our backyard where it really matters. Eventually we plan on fake grass in the front, but for now it is dead. Like a lot of our neighbors actually, we are in a drought out here.

So, after some weeding, digging, some amending and planting I now have this:

That's two star jasmine plants on the ends with three white rosebushes between and some nice bright annuals filling in the rest. Here is a shot of the far end:

I also, with some help from my brother, pulled out a dead lemon tree and planted a new Valencia orange tree in the back yard.

Our poor, deceased lemon tree. It was dug up and transplanted when we had our backyard landscaped back in May. The landscapers made no guarantees it would survive.

I think this is why all the watering and fertilizer I dumped on the poor thing didn't work, it had no more roots. For an older tree, 7-8 inches of roots just won't cut it. Hence why I am thinking the landscaper told us they couldn't guarantee it would survive.

But, it let my brother chop, chop and dig, dig. I didn't even have to give him beer or food, he was happy to get to hatchet it down to fit in the greens can.

And now we have a cute little dwarf tree to nurture.

Tomorrow, I will be clearing one of my raised beds out for planting some broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprouts. Time for garden, round two!