Digging in the dirt, part 2

On Friday, a group of about 200 employees from Big Advertising Agency took a day to volunteer at a homeless shelter in the West Loop. I was assigned to gardening and landscaping duty, which I was pretty excited about, except for the rainy forecast. For about 6-7 hours we weeded, mowed, turned over garden beds, built a sandbox, planted more flowers, mulched, and generally made the yards of the shelter look 100x better. The rain held off until after lunch, so it wasn't too bad all in all. I was pretty dirty by the time I was done, but it was a good dirty.

I must not have gotten enough of a gardening fix, because today I decided to create the flower beds on the side of the fence. This had been my plan for awhile - it was a pretty boring space where there was quite a bit of potential. This is what it looked like before I started:

I went to Lowes (I'm averaging 2 trips a week these days - I probably should invest in the company) and picked up some nice looking perennials, a few bags of topsoil, some trays of annuals, and a bag of mulch. I had two calla lilies and some calla lilly bulbs, along with some canna lilly rhizomes from Adam's mom. I left an area free of mulch where I planted a bunch of wildflower seeds. Hopefully these will grow...soon. Also bought 3 more hanging baskets and hung up the rest of the brackets. All in all it looks really nice.