Earlier this year, our family worked together to trim down the abelia hedge as part of the first phase of getting this garden bed under control.  You can tell it used to be a beautiful garden bed – a semi-circular hedge of flowering abelia bushes framing a lilac tree that offered some privacy to the bedroom and bathroom windows.  It has gone unchecked for too many years, though, and it needs a lot of work.  Here is how it looked before we trimmed the hedge in February… And here is how it looks today, now that the abelia bushes have started to leaf in. It already looks better, even though there is still a lot to do! We had a beautiful evening yesterday, so I worked on this garden bed for about an hour.  There were maple saplings that had been allowed to grow haphazardly for a few years, coming

I was on a high from building the vintage-style trellises for the front of the house, so I decided to do more math and make a DIY cedar garden obelisk.  I bought enough wood to make three trellises (two large and one small), but I decided to do something different on the wall where the small trellis was going to hang.  So, I had extra cedar that we cut down to 1 x 2s as well as some scraps from the trellis project and I wanted to use every bit I could.  You can find the plans for the vintage-style trellis HERE if you missed it and are interested in building one. I didn’t take pictures as I built the obelisk for two reasons.  One, it was sprinkling on and off so I was fitting in work on the project as weather would allow.  Two, I was completely winging it