Before our lovely abode was even finished being built, I had plans brewing of every design aspect I wanted to accomplish here. First thing on this list was the garden, and finally seeing if I could keep something alive and growing. Oklahoma dirt is not kind, as I have learned. This stuff is just red clay basically, and it will not have anything pretty growing in it. I didn't realize how in over my head I was right away.

     Now the garden they supply for you, is well just a simple garden, nothing too fancy. Some bushes that will end up growing over your sidewalk and look straight out of Jumanji. Ones that we have contemplated removing completely at times, then saying to ourselves  "what are we going to do with it once we have it out?". As well they give you not what I would call monkey grass per-say, but something in the family that has weird spiral things and something resembling a cat tail growing out of it. We do not question this plant, and I try to stay away from it as much as possible, as it has cut me a few times before.

     We got moved in and slightly unpacked before I grabbed the shovel and was "digging" away. The digging shortly turned into scraping the top of the earth just enough to lay some soil down. I didn't get to dig the usual 12" trench that you should for growing pretty things here. We went to Home Depot and spent an unearthly amount of money on annuals and small monkey grass plants for ground cover. As well as several bags of mulch, that not realizing our front yard gets an obscene amount of sun during the day. This mulch has been replaced several times since, no matter how much is says it won't fade; it is no match for this dry Oklahoma sun we have.

    I was so excited to get started on this project(second day we were here), that silly me forgot to take pictures before I started. Woops! Here is a mock up of basically what it looked like when we moved in first.

I don't know why I cut off our roof. I promise we have one. As well, our poor tree has been through a lot. I think he finally died this year after 63 days over 100 degrees.

Update: In that corner where the weird dead monkey grass type plant is, we replaced it with a  small rose bush. It does pretty well there now.