Busy gardening

I haven't posted a photo of the front of the house since the landscaping was done.

This photo that shows the grass seed has sort of started to catch on in spots, but only with a half-hearted effort.
This is the flower bed that Freda and I worked on today. We had purchased these flowers to pretty up the sign at the entrance to the development, but just hit rock within an inch when we tried to dig the hole for them! So we decided to plant them here. We had the same experience, so we did a raised bed. Because the soil (hah! it's 80% rock! 18% sand and 2% clay) is so poor, I made 3 trips with the wheelbarrow to another place on the property where there was "better" topsoil (it was 80% sand, 10% clay and 10% dirt), which we mixed up with a large amount of peat moss and a couple of bags of topsoil that we had left over from planting the roses.

Needless to say, we are pretty exhausted from all the planting. I have not yet posted a photo of the 3 lilacs, a mock orange, and a purple sandcherry that we planted. Those holes were dug primarily with a crowbar (for levering out the rocks!) We are watering those shrubs carefully as that was too much effort for us to let them die because of lack of water!
We must be gluttons for punishment, because today we went and helped our good friends Helen and Steve with their front garden. It was very large and too big for them to manage. They dug out a lot of irises and gave us a few. I planted them here along with a mallow (very wilted in center of photo) and couple of maples that I dug out from beside their house (at left, and at center back). I didn't supplement the soil here, so these plants will have to be made of tough stuff in order to survive!