Bob's Garden

 This area down by the lagoon was started with previous members of this committee. It was used as an area to put surplus plants, which was a great idea. However, it was soon overtaken by weeds and invasive grapevine.

We began to work on this last year by planting a few shrubs we found desirable and removing some of the weeds, but it got away from us as well and those plantings were swallowed up. The vines are relentless.

This year we began a concentrated effort to conquer this area and did a massive cleanup pulling thistles, weeds and grapevine with renewed vigor. It's startling how many nice plants we found back here.

Our next phase was to add some tall planters to keep the rabbits and weeds at bay, but the budget is already shot. What to do? Well, thanks to Pinterest and all the great ideas I get from there I had a solution.

I found five metal filing cabinets in Facebook Marketplace, my new favorite place to shop. Pete and I hauled them down to the lagoon which started a lot of conversation in the park. I'm sure they thought I'd lost my mind completely by now.

The drawers were removed from the cabinets, some giving much more of a fight involving manpower and hammers. Then they were tipped over and holes drilled into the back. This is where I learned I needed a metal drill bit and to go slow, not fast. My poor little drill started smoking.

Then the painting began, which involved a lot more spray paint than I ever dreamed necessary. This will add some color pop to an area that's been dark and neglected.

Two of the cabinets didn't have a bottom, which is now the side, so Mark came to the rescue with some scrap decking to hold the soil in.

I used the file hangers as plant supports for the peony area. I already had the two metal chairs that I sprayed hot pink, so I painted these to match and now we have a row of hot pink plant supports. Try saying that five times real fast.

One got painted yellow and that's near the red windmill. I'll plant some purple catmint in here and some hostas. I like the height variation this gives the garden.

The orange one is near the daylilies and by chance they actually match the blooms which was sweet. Not sure what will go here yet, but probably some varigated hostas or sedum. It would be a fun area to plant some zinnia seeds.

The smallest cabinet will be painted purple/lavender and will be filled with iris.

The two largest horizontal cabinets are parked further back in an area I cleared from the grapevine and were painted a sage green and teal. This will be our incubator area where I can start plants from seed and cuttings. 

The bottoms of all the planters have been filled with a couple inches of river rock and next we'll need to add compost and then top soil to mix in. The plantings will be iris and hosta for now to see how they handle the winter being raised out of the ground. It's like an experimental laboratory.

To me the best part of these added planters is that they create a weed block and we can spray around the sides to keep the icky stuff from coming up.