If At First You Don't Succeed.....

........try to kill your flowers and plants again. I have to say that Texas Summers are brutal for a lazy gardener such as myself. Even plants and flowers that are considered "drought resistant" are sometimes no match for this sample of hell that people call summer here.  And the first wipe out this summer can be blamed on a torrential Texas Storm not the brutal unforgiving god awful heat. But I will say that my Gardenia bush met its maker through a combo of my inattention and heat. So today I gave it another go. Just really wanting my garden to look beautiful. It was again over grown with weeds and I needed to weed it. But my dread of being in the heat caused me to procrastinate. I even got a quote from a lawn company who said they would charge me $85 to weed it. What? Yeah, I'm too cheap for that. I decided I was just going to have to pour on the sunscreen and bite the bullet until last Friday morning when I heard the gentle hum of a lawn mower in my neighbor's back yard. And what luck, 2 hard working high school kids hard at work. I walked up and asked the kid, "What would you charge for weeding that bed over there?" he looked leery and I thought he was seeing $$ signs when he said "I dunno $5 maybe $8 so my buddy and I can split it." I said "Really?!?!" Almost too emphatically. But before he could change his mind I was off to my car to dig through my Dave Ramsey cash envelopes. I gave the kid 2 $5 bills and you should have seen his face. "Thank you so much!" I love a kid that appreciates earning money for  hard work. I will encourage both Kate and Carson to get good summer jobs when they are older.(Maybe in a couple of years...I joke!) So I guess we both walked away thinking we got the deal of the century. And when I got home from work...Ahhhhhhhh nothing but dirt! It laid the ground work for this......

I decided not go overboard on the flowers. That way if things don't work out I won't be cursing Texas summers.....as much as I usually do.

Third times a charm for this spot in the back yard. First it was a magnolia tree, then it was my gardenia, and now a hearty "drought resistant", minimum of 6 hours of sun, water once a week in prolonged dry periods, $9.88 special,  Crape Myrtle. I have high hopes this time.