Hey everyone!

After our poor garden success here with the heavy clay, we started following the directions we learned from Sissy, the speaker at the Spring swap. So far, we have created 6 very nice, large flower beds using the method she described and let me tell you it is much easier than trying to dig up that hard as rock clay.

We cut the grass down very short, then sprayed it with grass killer and let it die, covered the ground with several layers of newspapers that I brought home from the office, filled it in with topsoil and added the plants. We used bricks that had been leftover when our house was built for surrounding the beds and also formed the newspapers up the sides of the brick for support and to hold the dirt in.

We got plenty of mums on sale for 25 cents each and several asters as well. The beds are looking great so far and its been at least a month for several of them.

We have been hard at work for several weeks doing this and needless to say, we are thrilled about our success and the beauty of our flower beds! We give all the credit to Garden Web, the Spring Swap and Sissy. We hope to be able to start preparing our large vegetable garden in the same way for next spring.

I'll try to upload some photos tonight of our beds on our webshots photo page for September.

BIG SMILES! :))

Katie & Rich