It grows mostly without intervention from me, which is good, because I’m not spending a lot of time on it. I did water pretty regularly for the first few weeks, but since then we’ve had rain regularly enough that I’ve only had to water a couple times. Weeding has been the thing I really needed to do, because all the plants grow, not just the ones I put there – random sprouts of grass, oak trees, and other uninvited greenery keeps popping up. So I spend an hour or so weeding every couple weeks to discourage all the volunteers. Weeding is way easier than it was when I was a kid – I never knew what to pull up and what to leave, whereas now I know exactly what I planted, and anything I didn’t plant gets yanked out. The melampodium are really happy – they’re flowering all over with bright yellow daisy-like blooms. Something’s eating the leaves of my vinca, but they persist nevertheless in making happy white, purple, and pink flowers, too. The hostas are blooming right now, too, which are funny – they send up these really tall shoots that bloom with lavender petals way up above the leafy body of the plant.

This is what my flowerbed looked like right after I planted it:

And this is what it looks like now:

My herbs are mostly happy, too – well, actually, they’re all happy except for the dill, which disappeared two days after I planted – something ate the plant, and then dug up the roots and ate those – I went out to water and found a little hole where my dill had once been. But the basil got up to nearly three feet tall before I decided to make pesto, and even that used less than half the plant. The lavender and rosemary don’t really get used much, but they smell nice when you walk by- I tend to pet them and have my hands smell nice for a while.

Yay for growing things!