Creating a New Flower Bed from Start to Finish: Ugly Backyard Problem SOLVED. No-Dig Garden Bed

Got an ugly spot in your yard that ruins the view? 🚫 From well heads to pipes to random eyesores, this simple gardening trick hides them beautifully. In this video, you’ll see a before and after backyard transformation where I cover an unsightly well pipe with a realistic faux rock and build a gorgeous new flower bed around it. 🌸

The best part? I used the no-dig sheet mulching method — the easiest way to turn grass into garden beds without removing sod. Perfect for beginners or anyone wanting a low-maintenance garden makeover.

If you’re looking for ideas on how to hide yard eyesores, start a new planting bed, or makeover your backyard on a budget — this video is for you!

Thanks for watching- Steph 🌱 (Gardening in Massachusetts zone 6b). #garden #gardening #diy #landscape #home
———————————————————————-
Coast of Maine Soils: https://coastofmaine.com/pages/find-local
———————————————————————-
Items Featured in this Video:
Post Hole Digger: https://amzn.to/3IlmKd6
Root Slayer Shovel, Red: https://amzn.to/42OZWsn
LED Headlamp: https://amzn.to/3KiIAyp
Long Watering Wand: https://amzn.to/4jvgcG6
Gorilla Carts Heavy-Duty Dump Cart: https://amzn.to/4jmQlQB
Vego Garden Hose Reel Retractable Hi-Flow x 100ft: https://amzn.to/42Lm4np

My Amazon Store Where You Can Find Many of My Favorite Garden Items
👉 https://amzn.to/49F9RTU
🌱Thank You for using my affiliate links🌱
———————————————————————-
✨Vego Products Click here 👉🏼 https://glnk.io/HookedandRooted

✨✨Be sure to Use the Exclusive Hooked and Rooted Discount that can be used in addition to any current Vego sales or promotions: HOOKEDANDROOTED10OFF

🌱Thank You for using my affiliate link🌱
———————————————————————-
☕Gift Steph or George a coffee ☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hookedandrooted
———————————————————————
Hooked and Rooted is a gardening show on Youtube. My shows & content include topics such as: Offering gardening tips for beginners, low maintenance garden ideas, landscaping for beginners, new build garden transformations, how to make your garden beautiful, sharing perennial plants and evergreen shrubs for the garden, and the best ground cover plants you can plant in your garden.
———————————————————————-
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hookedandrooted
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579278773348
———————————————————————-
Website & Contact:

💻 Website:
https://HookedAndRooted.com

📧 Email:
HookedandRooted@gmail.com

📬Mail:

Steph
Hooked and Rooted
PO Box N656
Westport, MA 02790
———————————————————————-

Now you see it and now you don’t. [Music] As a young girl, the feels were mine. We played hide and seeks. [Music] And two more. This thing does an excellent job. Look at all the light. So, if you’re a fan of nighttime gardening, you need a headlamp. Have you ever had something in your backyard that you wanted to disguise? Well, I did, and it’s hiding right here in this new garden bed. Just a few weeks ago, this area was all lawn with an exposed wellhead. And in today’s video, we’re going to show you how we turned a backyard eyesore into a beautiful new garden bed using the easy no dig gardening method. Hi, it’s Steph. Welcome back to my garden. Today’s video is a compilation of multiple weeks worth of work. And truth be told, I could have broken this project up into several videos, which would have made it easier to edit and I would have had weeks worth of content. But I wanted to make it a more pleasant viewing experience for my audience to see a full before and after. So, if you like that kind of content, I would love it if you could hit the thumbs up button. It would really help this video and help my channel. I’ve also added helpful tips throughout the video that we hope are useful to you. Thank you so much. And here is our project. It is a beautiful crisp August morning, feeling a lot like fall today. And we’re getting started on a new project. This is what we’re calling our wellbed project. And George is playing with a hose to kind of figure out an outline of how big this bed is going to be. So, we know what we’re working with. And George, you want to show us? So, I know where the bed is going to start. Right here next to this rock. Such a heavy rock. It’s actually a faux rock. You’re working on your muscles, huh? I am. See, I’m getting really strong. Um, but this faux rock is going to cover our well pipe, the wellhead. This one we chose because it has a sand color. And this beige color blends in with a lot of the rock that we have on our property. Yeah, it’s very similar to the all of the New England rock that we already have. And it fits perfect on there. Uh, the only thing is with the well-being here, we won’t be able to plant anything that has large roots. So, it’s going to be mostly perennials. My plan is to use some of these low growing ornamental grasses to sort of soften the edge of that faux rock. I also have some echanatia or cone flowers, some pens, some salvas, and some really pretty varieties of a new alium that I’m planning to plant in this bed, as well as a couple of hydrangeas. And down this end, I have a conifer. I have a group of three actually that I’m thinking I could use here. But on this end, being that it’s far enough from the wellpipe, it’s possible that I can plant some kind of shrub or slow growing tree, something with more shallow roots. Yep. Uh the other thing that I’m starting to think about is what I’m going to do to edge the bed. Mhm. And I would love to do more cobblestone. And I’ve searched recently and prices of reclaimed cobble have like really skyrocketed skyrocketed since we started collecting them for this area. Yeah. Um, and I like the look of these old cobbles that have, you know, different tones that see that they’re not uniform. They’re very irregular. Yeah, they have some patina and some I love that look. Yeah. So, I would want to get something that is, you know, sort of the same, but sourcing it could be tough. So, we’re going to have to think about that because it would definitely tie in the look, you know. So, this is our very rough draft and we’ll keep you posted as we continue to work on this project. This is the corner of my patio that I call Steph’s home nursery. It’s where I keep any plants that I’ve been purchasing and collecting throughout the season for different planting projects. And I’ve been saving some plants in this area for this wellbed project. And it’s been quite a task to keep them alive throughout the whole summer knowing that I wanted to do this once the weather cooled off. So, it’s a couple days later and I’ve been searching Facebook Marketplace for cobblestone and I found a seller that’s pretty local to us. It’s only about 18 minutes away and he was asking $3 for his cobblestone. He says he has about a h 100red stones. Um I went back and forth and he agreed on $2.50. So about $250 for 100 stones. We’ll see when we get there how many he actually has. But we don’t have a pickup truck. So I put a tarp down in Steph’s van. And we’ve done this multiple times. It’s not ideal, but it gets the job done. So let’s get some cobblestone. 12ft waves coming into the bag. Okay, it should be 50 a pallet if I did my math right. Okay, so we’re back home. We ended up getting 50 cobblestone instead of the 100 because the car is already loaded down and I didn’t want to push it. So, I did make arrangements with the seller to potentially go back tomorrow if we needed more. But, here’s what we got. I think it’s going to blend in pretty good with what we have now. It’s really old and irregular and it has that beige tone to it, which is pretty much what we have now. So, this is 50 cobblestone. Doesn’t look like much, but it’s very heavy. So, I’m going to get a wheelbarrow and bring it to the back. [Music] So, it’s the next day and I just picked up 50 more cobblestone from the same seller. Yesterday, I was able to place the cobblestone that we purchased and we got halfway through the bed. Well, halfway around. So, we’re close. We’ll see if this 50 will get us all the way around or if we’re going to need a little bit more. So, it’s been about a week and that last load of 50 cobblestone did the trick. I was able to edge this whole bed and we actually started another bed right down in the corner that really wasn’t in the plan, but now it created another new path. So, in order to get these cobblestones placed, I dug a trench and I placed strips of landscape fabric underneath the cobblestone and placed my cobblestone. So, now the next step is to actually start the sheet mulching method, which involves bringing in some cardboard into the bed. But the first thing we did was buzz down all of the grass. So, I brought in my lawn mower and I set it really low and we got the the grass cut. And then I went with my uh weed whacker and trimmed up the edges. Now we’re on to the sheet mulching part of the project. And it’s been a few weeks that we’ve been working on this. I actually took a trip to Michigan. I was invited by Proven Wyinners and Walters Gardens to go to a creator event and it was a lot of fun. I learned some really cool things that I’ll be sharing with you over the next several months. Some new plants that are coming out in 26, which is so exciting. And I even got to go through the Walters Gardens production facility and work on planting some uh baby plant starts. It was a lot of fun. Uh Walters Gardens is where all of the Proven Winners perennials are produced. So, it was a really great experience. I got to meet a lot of cool uh other content creators, a lot of which you know and watch here on YouTube as well. And so, while I was away, George was so gracious and helpful and was able to get this project started for me with all of the heartscape. So, the outline of the bed is done, the cobble is placed, and now we’re on the portion where we’re going to do sheet mulching. Now, if you’re not familiar with sheet mulching, it is also known as the lasagna method where you are going to layer cardboard and compost as well as mulch, and it’s going to create a new planting bed without the need for having to dig up your turf or your sod. So, I have this really large piece of cardboard that we got from a piece of furniture that is nice and clean. So, ideally, when you do the sheet mulching method, you want to find cardboard that doesn’t have any ink on it, staples, tape, nice clean pieces of cardboard like this, and ideally with less cuts is going to be perfect for this use. And typically what I love to use, and something that I’ve shown on my channel before, um, and I figured out a couple of years ago, is this type of cardboard. This is a 4×4 square of really clean cardboard. It’s called pallet cardboard and it’s what usually comes on pallets when you go to box store retailers and they have specifically like cases of water on these or cases of soda, whichever. But these are great to use for sheet mulching. So, now that George cut the grass all the way down, um we are going to layer the cardboard. Then we’re going to bring in some compost and then I will finally get to do the fun stuff, which is planting a lot of beautiful perennials in this area. [Music] As you can see, these 4×4 sheets of pallet cardboard work great for sheet mulching. Now, this is also known as the no dig method because you’re not digging out your your turf or your sod in order to plant into. You’re just layering cardboard, soil, and mulch, and you’re planting right into that. And a question I often get on my channel when I do the sheet mulching method is, “When can I plant into that bed or into that cardboard?” And you have two options here. If you know that you want a new bed next spring, right now we’re in fall, you can actually prep that space a season ahead to give that cardboard time to break down and feed your soil. You’ll get some great worm activity in there, and then it’ll be ready for you to plant in spring. It also gives you time to plan what you’re going to plant into that bed. So, it’s a great option to do it a season ahead. However, if you don’t uh want to wait, you can actually plant into it right away. It is a little bit more difficult because the cardboard hasn’t broken down yet and you kind of have to cut into it, but it is possible. I’ve also planted the plants and then placed the cardboard all around it, which is also another method that you can use. I actually did that in a bed um last season or the season before and it works well. So, there’s a few ways you could go about it, but the next step after you put down your cardboard is to wet it to start that decomposition process. So, I’m going to go ahead hose all this down. It’s also going to help weight down the cardboard so it doesn’t blow around in the wind. And once I get this pretty soaked, we will start layering some soil. [Music] For the soil layer, I’m going to be using the Coast of Maine Copscook blend. It’s an ingground garden soil. If you’ve been around my channel for a while, you know that I love to use the Coast of Maine soils. It has all organic and natural ingredients so that you get really good soil health. And this inground soil is for vegetable gardens and flower beds that are planted in the ground, which is what we’re doing today with a new flower bed. And once I actually get to the planting hole, I’m going to use the Quatty Blend, which is the lobster compost. Um, it’s lobster and crab. Has excellent ingredients. It’s for vegetables, flowers, and plants as well, and it improves your soil. So, I’m going to use some of the native soil that I dig up from the planting hole with this Quatty Blend once I actually get to planting. [Laughter] [Music] We are all done putting down the soil and it looks so good. It actually looks like a planting bed. Now, you can see that we left a gap around the edges all the way around. And the reason for that is that when we put our mulch down, it has a place to die down into the cobble. We also put down our faux rock, and I think it looks really pretty, and I cannot wait to see what it looks like once we get all of the plants in place. Well, I wanted to plant today, but it got too hot. This area is morning shade and afternoon sun. And now that the sun is over this space, I’m going to put it on pause until tomorrow morning and plant when it’s nice and cool and shady. The fall is actually a perfect time to do planting. So, if you are going to undergo a project, consider Coast of Maine soils. I will leave a link below where you can plug in your zip code and it’s the retail finder. It’ll tell you a local nursery or garden center near you that carries Coast of Maine soils. I often find mine at my local Ace Hardware right down the street. So, if you have an Ace, maybe you can find some there as well. [Music] As a young girl, the feels were mine. We played hide and seek for hours. Raised our shadows among the It is finally planting day and I am so excited. I’ve brought all my plants over and I started to place them. These are plants that I’ve been collecting throughout the whole season. And the way that I like to design a new planting area is by choosing plants that have different seasons of interest. So things that will bloom in spring, in summer, and provide fall interest as well. And different textures and colors. So I have some plants that are silvery white. I have some that have dark foliage. And of course, some with green foliage, but that have different textures. So I think that everything is looking really beautiful. I also have some plants that I will be transplanting from other areas in the garden, but I have a lot of work ahead of me. I’m going to get to planting and when everything is set, I will give you a tour of what went into this new bed. We spent summers catching fireflies and winters on our skates. One big smile across my face. We used to dance our way to church on Sundays. Mama set the pace. Day dreamrer kidn take me back all the way back to the days running around in a garden. We’re about onethird of the way done and we got into a little bit of a rhythm. So, we’re doing pretty well. And we made a discovery this morning. What is it, George? So, on the second plant that we’re planting, I noticed that the whole So, the majority of the plants are these size containers. So they’re about 2 and a half quarts to one gallon. Yeah. And I realized that my post hole digger pretty much makes a hole the size of these containers. So that one fits in. And this one’s really close, right? So I started using the post hole digger to get my initial hole and then I’d grab my root slayer to open up the hole a little bit more. But this has been helping out tremendously just to get the hole started and then we move on from there. Yeah, it’s working really well. So George makes the hole, I go in, put in the amendments and plant the plant and then we move on to the next. Yeah. a post hole dig. I’ve never thought of it, but it’s working out really well. Well, it is planting day two and we got a good amount done yesterday. I’m really loving the way that things are turning out and the plant combinations that I chose. So, today we’re going to keep chipping away at it. It is a Sunday, so we don’t want to be out here all day. Uh we got a little bit of a slow start to the morning, so it’s a little later. The sun’s already starting to creep into the bed. So, we’re going to do a couple of hours, get some more things in the ground, but we still have some plants to transplant from other areas, etc. So, we’ll see how much we can get done and we’re just going to keep going. As I was planting up this border, I realized that I’ve had some plants here that I’ve been carrying over for quite some time. In fact, these nepida here, I actually grew from bare root. About 2 years ago, Walters Gardens had sent out a box of some bare root uh cats meow nepida, and it was just a bunch of dry roots that I had to put in the soil and plant, and then they would eventually grow into what you see here. So, these are about 2 years old, and they’re finally ready for me to find a place for them in the landscape. And this is a perfect spot now that we’re creating this new bed. So many of these perennials were ones that I had purchased and gathered throughout the whole season this year. Some of them are going to be transplants from other areas in the garden. And this nepida here was actually grown from bear root. So there are many ways to create a new garden. So we’re making progress and George just dug a hole for me right here in front of the fountain because I want to do a transplant next. I have an eto pini that didn’t bloom really well for me this past spring. So, we’re going to move it to that spot. And I think that’s going to be a really great place because right across the path here, I have another eto pey, one that we planted this spring. It’s the scrumdilumptious by Eley. It had a gorgeous like blush pink bloom. And so, I think it’ll look really nice to have one right across the way so that when you’re walking down the path, you have spring color on both sides. So, let me show you the other peie. So, this is the Bartzella, which is a really pretty light yellow pey, but you can see that it’s under the foliage of my um amber ghost Japanese maple. So, right now it’s getting a little bit of morning sun, but it doesn’t quite get enough sun for it to produce blooms. So, I’m going to go ahead and dig it up and move it to that new area. [Music] Well, the peie is transplanted. The fall is actually the perfect time to transplant perennials and any panies that you want to move. Now, I had no idea where I was going to put this peie, but I knew it had to be moved. And this new bed lended itself perfectly to putting it here so it has a neighbor across the way. Now, when you transplant a peie, um, fall, like I mentioned, is the best time to do that. But, you want to make sure you get a good portion or the whole root ball, which is what I did. And you want to make sure that you don’t plant it too deep. PE eyes need to be at least at surface or not more than an inch below surface because if the eyes are too deep, they won’t bloom well. So they need a good amount of sun and they also need to have their eyes um sort of at surface level or just below. So now the bartella is planted here. I think this is a good stopping point for today. We’ve put in a couple of hours. It’s Sunday. We want to enjoy the rest of our day. So we will continue with this project in the next couple of days and just keep making progress. The next day, I started with more transplanting. And these perennials that I had planted here in this bed were getting shaded by the bloodg good Japanese maple. And while this mantro white calam was doing pretty well, the sedum that I had planted behind them, the matrona sedum got pretty leggy and didn’t bloom as well as I had hoped. So, I dug them up and I think they’ll make a great addition to the new bed. Plus, they’ll get a lot more sun. All right, we’re losing light, so we’re just trying to get as much as we can get done. So, while Steph works on transplanting some stuff over there, I’m working on some of the details on this bed before we get a mulch delivery. And what I ended up doing was gathering a bunch of stones I have. And what I plan on doing is just putting a strip of fabric across here and laying it over and then building a little bit of a retaining wall along that edge so that when we put mulch in here, we have the rocks to keep it from spilling over and losing the mulch. So that’s what I’m working on now. So I’m doing a little bit more transplanting. And here I have this carrots that was planted in my Japanese maple garden. A friend in my garden club had given me one small division from her garden several years ago. I divided it into two. And look how large they have gotten. And now I’m actually going to divide it again right in half. And from one plant that a friend had given me, I will now have four that I’m going to place in this new bed right here. So to divide it, all I’m going to do is take a horih hory knife and I am going to look for the center point or as I mean as close to the center as possible. It’s never going to be perfect, but you just try your best. And then you take your either a bread knife or in my case, I really like to use these hori hors. And I’m just going to kind of just start cutting it in the middle. [Music] Now, you will lose some blades and that’s okay. There we go. And here is one. And here is two. And I’m going to do the same thing with the other. The fall is a perfect time to do this. And two more. Well, you can see it’s pretty much pitch black now. It’s only 7:30 in the evening, but it’s getting darker earlier. And my very handy garden assistant is using his mechanic tool to get this done. What do you have on your head, George? So, this is my light. I do a lot of automotive work. And typically, if I go underneath the dashboard, I’ll use this light. All I see is you look like an alien right now. I just see this big beam of white light. Look, right. Does it look really dark on camera? Really dark. This thing does an excellent job. I got it on Amazon. I think I paid like 15 bucks for it. Look at all the light. Yeah. So, if you’re a fan of nighttime gardening, you need a headlamp. The only thing is it attracts bugs. Yes. Yes. I think I need like a mosquito net over me. You would need to wear beekeepers hat with it. Makes a difference. It does. It makes a huge difference. We’re about to get a mulch delivery tomorrow. So, we are really pushing hard to get this bed finished up so that we can just put our mulch down and be done. We are really committed to this project. We’ve been working on this for weeks and we just want to knock it out and get it ready. If anyone out there likes to do nighttime gardening, I’ll put a link to this headlamp down below. [Music] So, this headlamp is coming in clutch right now. Super good. You know, with the headlight lamp on like this, it’s kind of um it’s reminding me of those cops episodes where they’re trying to find somebody in the woods at night. Bad Boys. Bad Boys. That one. That kind of cops show. Yeah. A criminal gardener. Yes. Working at night. We’re such geeks. Well, it’s working out until until the battery dies. You got a full charge on that thing. I got two more plants to go. Two more. Well, we got our goal accomplished. We got this bed all planted up and it is now ready for mulch tomorrow. Now, we are just finishing up with some watering. And that is it. So, George, that headlamp worked perfectly for us to get this all done. So, we’ll see you guys again tomorrow. We’re on to the mulching. Our delivery came and man, we forgot how much work mulching is. So glad that I have George to help. So, he’s been loading up the mulch. And once we dump it in the bed, I’ve been spreading it with this small shrub rake. But the mulch that I like to get is the fine ground pine bark mulch. It’s nice and dark, which is close to the black that I really like to see in my beds. I think it really sets off my plants and makes a really nice finishing touch. It’s all organic material. You can see there’s little pieces of brown bark in there as well. From far away, it kind of just looks like a compost. So, we’re going to keep putting down the mulch, and the next scene will likely be a tour of this new area. [Music] As a young girl, the feels were mine. We played. Well, here is our completed project. And I’m ecstatic with how it turned out. I think it looks absolutely beautiful. And you would never know that there used to be a wellhead here because this faux rock once we did all of our plantings and put the mulch down, it softened everything up and it really helps kind of disguise that and it looks really natural. Um, I will link the rock that we used down below and um, I’m just really excited with all of it. I think that the plantings that I chose worked out really well and I cannot wait to see them all bloom next season. But let me share with you what I planted in this bed. So, I started with the shorter plants across the front and George actually picked out this silvery looking plant here. Now, keep in mind that it is the end of the season, so some of these plants are not going to look their absolute best. But this is a type of armia, also known as wormwood, and it is called silver brigade. And it’s supposed to be a low ground cover, kind of spreading type of armia. And I think it’ll provide a really nice silvery white color in the front of this bed. It makes a nice contrast to our dark pine bark mulch and against the dark foliage on some of the plants that I’ve selected. So you can see I also added a sedum. This is a low growing ground cover type sedum and it is called the stone crop sunsparkler dazzleberry. It is perennial and it is done blooming now but it has these really beautiful raspberry colored blooms. And just yesterday I happened to hop into the Home Depot because I needed something. And as I was walking out through the garden center like I often do I spotted these beautiful daisies that were in bloom. Now, these are the Proven Winners Amazing Daisies 2, Banana Cream 2. Let me show you the tag. Amazing Daisies Banana Cream 2. Now, these are an improvement over the original Banana Cream Amazing Daisies. So, these are bred to have a bit more of a floriferous habit. So, they’re more long blooming, they get more flowers, and they have a nice tidy uh foliage. So, I thought they were really beautiful. And of course, the fact that they’re in bloom in almost the end of September um definitely made me want to bring them home. These are a late summer bloomer. And I added some grasses as the next step up. You can see that these are going according to height. And these are little bunny grasses. And they are actually these are not little bunny, these are piglet. They have a super cute name. Let me show you the tag. Yes. So, these are the piglet. They’re a dwarf fountain grass. They only get to be about 1 to one and 1/2 ft tall and wide, and they have all of their beautiful bloom plumes. Now, as we head into fall, now behind the grasses, I have some perennials that are going to offer a lot of height um in the let’s see, late spring um pensammen. This is the Proven Winners Midnight Masquerade Pensammen. I have some in my front border. I love it. It’s got these tall sprays of these bell-shaped blooms that the pollinators love and a very light purple pink color and dark foliage. So, they make a really pretty clump of foliage even if you cut all of the bloom stocks off. Some people leave them up because as they dry they have really pretty um seed pods. So, I have a drift of three of those going across. And I also have some flocks planted right here. Now, there are still a couple of blooms that are coming onto the flocks. You can see right here, this one. And this is a newer variety as well. It is the uh luminary pink lightning. That’s what it’s called. And I also have three of these. Now, I want to add two more. So, I left some space for them on the other side so that I have a drift of five kind of weaving through this bed. And the way that I selected all of these plants were I was looking for a difference in texture, in foliage color, in blooms, and in different heights. And I put everything that was going to be a little bit taller in the center and everything that would be a little bit shorter on the outer edge of the border, which is what you’re supposed to do. Kind of like a step down approach. And a perennial that I’m really excited about are these two right here. This is the cotton candy telrum. And this bloomed for me earlier in the season and they have the most beautiful blooms. They are a very light pink and they kind of make these puffs and the foliage almost looks like coline. I’m pretty sure that they’re part of the same family and they just look really pretty. So I am really looking forward to seeing these bloom next season. I have some of this newer, taller alium as well. This is the bobblehead alium. And you can see how these are the spent blooms, but they’re still nice and tall and still providing some visual interest. Here in this bed, I planted a drift of that nepida that I talked about um having started from bare root. This is the cat’s meow. And I have four going across this way and I put the other two on the other side. Here is that Bartzella peie. This is an eto peie that we transplanted. And you might recall from some of my older videos that I had this solar fountain over by my patio in a bed. And when we replaced the fountain this spring with a larger fountain, this ended up in the shed. But now that we have this new area, I think this is the perfect spot. When we were creating the bed, we had leveled a paver in the center that now is covered up by mulch, but it is keeping the bird bath nice or the fountain nice and level. And right around it, I planted a trio of some of the Eley Compressa junipers. Uh, these are pretty compact. They should grow only about three feet in height and 1 to 1 and 1/2 ft in width over 10 years. They have a 2 to 4 in growth rate. So, because of that, I felt that they would be a nice evergreen to add in this space. And moving around, you can see that I left it pretty open in the center there. And that is because I planted a hydrangeanger. That is a panacle hydrangeanger. It is a new one for 2026 by Proven Winners called Powerball. And when I went to Michigan, I saw one in person that had the largest panacle blooms I had ever seen. And you can see that it is starting to transition over to its beautiful rosy shades of pink for the fall. The blooms start a limey green before going creamy white and then transitioning to those shades of pink with the cooler nights of late summer and fall. But this gets 3 to 6 feet tall and wide. So I think it’s going to fill out this space really nicely. And some of the other plants that I transplanted. So this is the Montro white nepida. There’s one here and one on that side. And I also brought over some sedum. Now this is the matrona sedum. I really love the dark stems. Now it got a little bit taller and leggy leggier than it should be because it was reaching for light. It was getting a bit shaded by a tree over in that bed. So, I think that this is going to be a much better spot for it. And I’m looking forward to seeing how it does in this space. And again, I used uh a similar combination of plants on this end with having some sedums, another drift of that piglet dwarf fountain grass and some of the dark side of the moon a stillbe. Now, this dark foliage contrasting with these plants and some of this silver armia. I really love the look of this. I have a lot of fun playing with plant combinations because I really enjoy um combining plants of different colors and textures and seeing how they all come together. And right in the front I found some pop star balloon flowers and I added those for a little pop of pink blooms. Now they’re really short only at about 8 to 10 inches tall and wide. You can see they look like a little balloon and when they pop you get this pretty light pink bloom. Now this was created with plants that I collected throughout the season, some transplants from my garden, some divisions. I still have this flat of plants that I want to add in this bed. And these are actually some white swan echanatia or cone flour that I started from seed this year. I used the winter sewing method to start these and then I potted them up in these little 4×4 pots and grew them on a little bit more. You can see that they’re looking a little stressed at the end of the season and they definitely want to get out of these pots. So, I have about a dozen of them and they are going to be beautiful white blooms that I am going to add in this bed. Now, I did choose plants that were mostly deer and rabbit resistant because this area backs up to our woods. So, this is definitely going to be a bit of a buffet for the wildlife. But the cone flowers are not going to be rabbit resistant. So, I might have to spray those, but I still think they’re going to look really beautiful in this bed. The hydrangeas will need some protection as well. But you can see that we created this path here that is just wide enough for George to be able to get his mower through. And it also provided me with another planting bed. Now, this planting bed I edged with the carrots that I had moved over from my Japanese maple garden. I started with one plant from a friend that then grew into two after I divided it. And when I took it out of that area and brought it over here, I thought I was initially going to get four plants out of it. Well, I was actually able to get five out. And that way, I was able to line this whole edge. And as it grows, this grassy texture is going to really soften this cobblestone edge. and it’s going to spill over and I think it’s going to look really pretty. And in between the carrots, I planted some Dolce wild berry hooka. I think this deep purple foliage makes a really nice contrast to the variegated white and green foliage and texture of the carrots. And right behind I have two new hydrangeas for 2026 from Proven Winners that I’m actually testing in my garden. They don’t look their best right now because it is the end of the season, but next spring they will leaf out and look beautiful. These are a new variety of smooth or arubberescent type hydrangeas. It is called the stormroof and it has been grown to have a stronger stem. Some of these big smooth hydrangeas have such large bloom heads that when it gets really windy or rainy, uh they will get weighted down and sometimes lay on the floor. Well, this variety is supposed to be an improvement on that. and the stems should be stronger and stay more upright. So, we will put it to the test. These get about three to four feet tall and wide. So, as these grow, they should fill out this back space here. Everything that I showed for this project can definitely be scaled down. You don’t have to make a bed as large as I did. You can apply these principles and make something smaller. And we used a rock to cover a wellhead, but there are many things in gardens that can be utilitarian that you might not prefer to look at. Electrical outlets, meters, pool equipment. Let me know if you’ve ever had anything in your own garden that you’ve wanted to disguise and what have you done about it. Also, did you like any of the plants that I planted here? Was there anything in particular that stuck out to you that you really liked? I would love to know in the comments. Thank you so much for spending your time with me and I’ll catch you in the next