When I visit a Lowe's Home Improvement centre I always make it a point to visit their garden centre. My first stop in the garden centre is always the clearance tables which have been dubbed by me and my sisters as "the dead table". Of course the plants on the dead table are not dead; however, they are sometimes highly stressed. Often they are simply the remains of stock Lowe's want to quickly get out of the way so they do not have to bother maintaining them. Back in November a visit to the Lowe's garden centre netted several healthy perennials that were part of a large quantity of end of year stock on the dead table. Several people were crowded around the dead table grabbing plants; one lady had her pull cart so full that plants were falling off as she headed to the cash registers. I skipped over things that I already had in my gardens but still ended up with six different plants, a Montauk daisy, a Russian sage, a Vermillion Buffs sage, a Goodness Grows speedwell, a Blue Fortune hyssop, and an unknown variety of verbena as the tag was missing. I had been considering for some time about building a small flower bed in the rough shape of a triangle at the side entrance to the front garden. The bed would welcome visitors to the front garden and they would be directed either right along the front of the house, or left along the fence. With the new plants I found on the dead table at Lowe's, I decided the time to build the bed had come as I had no other areas in the gardens at the moment to place the plants. The first stage in constructing a new bed is to determine the shape of the new bed and how large it needs to be. In this case, I already knew I wanted the bed to be in the rough shape of a triangle with a rounded base so I needed to determine the size of the bed to accommodate the plants I had purchased at Lowe's. To determine the size of the bed you have to take into consideration the size of the plants at their mature growth so they do not overly crowd each other. I determine the placement of the bed and spaded the ground around the perimeter so I had a clear visual as to the shape and size of the bed. I place the potted plants where they would be planted, leaving the required space between them, to check the size of the bed. Once I had checked the size of the bed, I removed the pots and continued to spade the ground. It is important to loosen the soil that will form the bottom of the bed so you will get proper drainage; this is especially important if your border is going to be tightly fitted. If you fail to do this, you could end up with your plants standing in too much water after a period of heavy rains. Furthermore, if your bed is going to be shallow this will allow the roots to be able to grow downward into the soil much easier and you will have healthier roots which translate into healthier plants. If your base soil is loamy and rich in organic material, then you can moved on to building the border. However, if your base soil is clay or sandy, then you will need to mix in some composted organic material. You want to ensure the base soil will not pack over time forming a barrier to water drainage and making it more difficult for proper root growth. Mix the organic material into the base soil with your spade, turning over the soil several times. Once the base soil has been properly prepared, it is time to build the border. Your border can be constructed of a variety of materials. If you visit the garden centre of your favourite home improvement shop, you will find a variety of man made stones and blocks as well as timber suitable for building flower bed borders. The idea of the border is to define the flower bed and to form a container to hold the soil in place. The material I used for my border was stones found on the property. I like using these natural stones to form my borders; each stone is unique, and the cost of the material is free. All I have to do is to expend the energy to carry them from the property to the gardens; although it was not an easy task as these stones are heavy. Once you have your border built, it is time to fill the flower bed. We will use maths to determine how much soil is needed to fill the bed. The volume of the flower bed is calculated by multiplying the depth of the bed times the area of the base of the bed. In my case, the shape of the bed was a rough triangle with a rounded base which would be the area of a triangle plus the area of a chord. Since I could see that the volume of the chord was going to be insignificant to the rest of the volume, I did not bother with that calculation; It was evident that a couple of bags of soil would fill the area. If you are building a small bed, then buying the soil at a garden centre in bags that you can easily transport is perfectly fine. However, if you are building a large bed, or several beds, you may want to have your soil truck into your site. My local garden centre sells soil in 28 litre (1 cubic foot) bags; therefore, I would convert the volume of the flower bed into bags of soil so I would know how many bags of soil to purchase. I place the bag of soil in the bed and use the spade to cut down the length of the bag. I then flip the bag over and dump out the soil, folding the bag along the cut to finish shaking out the soil left in the corners of the bag. Once you have several bags of the soil dumped into the bed, use a garden rake to spread the soil evenly around the bed. Add more bags of soil and spread evenly around the bed; repeat until you have filled the bed to the proper level. Once you have the bed filled and the soil spread evenly around the bed, it is time to remove the plants from their pots and plant them in their new home. You will probably find that the roots have grown out and around the inside of the pots. You want to carefully loosen these roots and spread them out without damaging or breaking too many of them. Scoop out enough of the soil in the bed to place the plant into the soil keeping the original depth of the plant level with the surface of the bed; you don't want to plant deeper, or shallower, than the plant was in the container soil. Once you have planted all of the plants for the flower bed, you want to water each plant. This will help to settle the soil around the roots as well as giving them a drink. I was quite pleased with how the flower bed turned out. One of the local shops had tulips in various colours, six bulbs to a bag at $1.50 per bag. I brought a bag of red, a bag of yellow, and a bag of a dark midnight blue. I planted the tulip bulbs in and around the plants. The tulips are spring blooming and will be up and blooming before the other plants in the bed. By the time the tulips have stopped blooming, the other flowering plants will be up to take over for summer blooms.

The idea behind Kimberly's Garden is twofold; one is to have a place where I can share my gardens with others, and two,  a single location for all things garden where one can come to gather information on plants, learn new tips, share ideas, and exchange plants and seeds with others.  I will be including a forum soon that I hope will become a community of friends where fellow gardeners meet to ask for help, give help to others, and exchange ideas.  I am excited about "Kimberly's Garden" and what I hope to accomplish with it.  My goal is to build a community where gardeners can gather as well as a place I can showcase my love of gardening.  Gardening can be as simple as a few containers on a patio, to full scale gardens covering acres, to everything in between.

Gardening has been a life-long passion with me that started at an early age.   Mum and Dad had this passion as well and it carried over to me.   Never did we live somewhere that we did not have gardens around our home, both vegetable gardens as well as flower gardens.   During my childhood we lived in rented homes and often when we first moved in, the home would be bare of any real gardens; a situation that we would soon remedy.  I remember moving to one home that had an old tree stump a short distance from the house.  Mum and I dug up the soil around the tree stump and soon had flowers growing.  The stump of the tree served as as a stand for a pot of flowers.  It was not long before we had proper gardens around the house with a wide range of flowers and plants growing including a vegetable garden that provided fresh produce for the table.  I live not far from the last home we rented and I often drive by the place on my way to town.  The place is nothing like when we lived there; the gardens are bare of the flowers we worked so hard to plant.

Spring has arrived and the daffodils and forsythias are in full bloom.  There are a variety of daffodils in the gardens, and the variety helps to lengthen the time that daffodils are in bloom.  My peach and plum are also covered in blossoms, and the plum fills the air with it sweet fragrance; the bees are having a day feeding on the plum.  So far this spring we have been lucky and the temperatures are staying above freezing.  Last year we had three days in spring where the daytime high did not go above freezing.  The results was that I lost part of my fig bush, two rose bushes that I had just planted, the plums, apples, and peaches were severely limited in production to almost nothing, the peonies did not bloom; the buds stopped growing, and I noticed the back garden holly did not produce any berries.  This spring has been gorgeous and I hope that it continues to be so. However, the last average date of frost for my location is April 15, so there is still plenty of time for a killing frost to arrive.

Below are a few shots of the various daffodils (narcissus) in the gardens as well as a shot of one of the back garden forsythias. There are between 40 and 200 different daffodil species, subspecies or varieties of species and over 25,000 registered cultivars of daffodils. Therefore, one can have a great variety of daffodils in a garden of which I only have a few.