The day of planting many things

Today I planted native perennials in a butterfly garden at the Oahe Downstream Recreation area. Mom and I also went to the local greenhouse and bought more plants to beautify the large, raised bed garden on the south side of the house, and the former sand pit by the back door. I really should have taken some better 'before' shots, because then you would appreciate the 'afters' even more.

The south garden. It doesn't look like much from here, but before it was full of  tall weeds and at least two year's worth of grass. Dad was digging out the clumps of turf and transplanting them to bare spots in the lawn.

One half of the garden is for the perennials that we discovered while weeding (some Sweet William and a milkweed) and I added in some herbs (parsley, basil, and dill).

This is the super spiky yucca plant. It's quite happy there and I have no intention of moving it.

A close up of the Sweet William. Apparently, every time Dad tries to grow it in PA it gets eaten by slugs. It's generally too dry for slugs in South Dakota and I am totally OK with that.

The other half of the garden has some vegetables (kale, swiss chard, and zucchini). This area gets what I think amounts to full sun over the course of the day so I'm trying out the veggies here to see what happens.

This is essentially the sidewalk before...

And this is the sidewalk after. There was a disintegrating sidewalk here and a pile of pavers by the garage. Dad used the pavers to build a new sidewalk over the old one and it looks a lot better.

We took two planters full of sand and cigarette butts and  made them planters again. This one has varieties of Coleus and lives on the front porch.

This was the sand pit. We added more soil, a flat of Portulaca, and the second planter to spruce it up.

I put this planter together with live wire grass, geraniums, and something called Persian shield.

The garden snail actually has a decent domain to watch over.

This is another planter I made that lives on the back deck.  At this point I don't remember everything that's in there but the grass is baby King Tut, there's a Medusa ornamental pepper and lots of Lobelia.

Mom made this planter with succulents. It will live behind the kitchen sink during the winter.

Thanks to my Mom and Dad for their help beautifying the outside of the house. Not many people take gardening vacations, but I'm glad they did.