Buying A Home From A Gardener: Positives and Negatives

The lady that lived in our home before we did loved gardening. From the info I got from our neighbors she spent hours upon hours gardening and was a part of many gardening clubs. She ended up loosing this house and then a company that flips houses took over. They kept a lot of her flowers and just remodeled the inside. They didn't do anything really to the outside and put the house for sale in the winter. That's where we come in. We saw the house after looking at a lot of houses and having FOUR houses we put bids on fall through. We loved the cute little neighborhood and the house was perfect. We instantly put a bid in it and they accepted our offer. We finally had our first house!

I was 8 months pregnant when we moved in and I had Eli just as it was starting to get warm outside. I had him via c-section so I wasn't able to do much in terms of gardening. I still did some stuff (shhh don't tell my doctor) but mostly I took it easy. Come to find out the previous owner was an avid gardener. The neighbors told us that there wasn't many places left in her yard that was grass. It was all flowers. We found that out when random flowers started popping up here and there. It was like FLOWERAGEDDEN! We had so many flowers we didn't know what to do with them all and I guess she even took most of her garden with her and we were left with a lot of the scraps. So. Many. Flowers. So we ended up taking out a lot of them but we also kept a lot of them. After gardening the whole day I wanted to share some good and bad about buying a home that was a gardeners.

Lets start of with the positives. I love being positive and I am a super positive person so I figured this is the best place to start. Even my negatives are not super negative. Okay, here we go:

Positive Number 1- You don't have to buy flowers: This is our second year living here and I have yet to buy a single flower. We have just kept her old flowers and either kept them in the same spot or moved them to a better one. My neighbor also gave me two plants that she divided. Yay for free flowers!

Positive Number 2- You don't have many weeds: I have lived at a house where there were so many weeds and it was so hard to garden. It made it so much harder and more work to do anything. When you buy a home from a person that likes to garden, you find out they took great care of their garden. There are some weeds but not really much. It makes it a lot easier to do what you want to the garden to not have to worry about weeds.

Positive Number 3- Flowers are a surprise: I have never been a master gardener. I actually have no clue on what most flowers names are. Thanks to my wonderful neighbor I have been slowly finding out what flowers I have and how pretty they really are. Every flower that comes up is a surprise to see what it blossoms into. It is like a game and a present all in one!

Now lets go to some negatives. We will start at positive number 3 because that is both a gift and a curse...

Negative Number 1- You have no clue what the heck is going to pop up and where. I don't even know what half my plants are. My poor neighbor has me constantly asking her if something is an actual plant or a weed. There are so many flowers that we have had to pull up and just when we think we got them all, five more pop up! It is annoying to have to keep on digging up flowers that are just randomly popping up in your yard.

Negative Number 2- It is a lot of hard work. I have been gardening for the past 6 hours and just got the sides of my house done. I know that I missed a lot of flowers that I didn't want in there too so I know over the summer or over the next couple years that I will have to keep digging stuff up. I feel like its a never ending process.

Negative Number 3- You waste a lot of flowers. I feel so bad having to throw flowers away. I was going to try to give them away but there was just too many of them. We have thrown away around 10 bags of flowers with weeds and dirt mixed in. To even list them on a give away site or to tell people to come and take them I would have to know what exactly they are. I definitely don't know what any of the flowers names were that I pulled up. Plus, we would have to find a place to keep them until they could be given away. Which we don't have a lot of room.

There are the three positives and negatives that I can come up with right now about buying a home from someone who likes to garden. Especially if you are such an amateur gardener like I am. I do not know what I am doing at all. I am horrible with before and afters but I wanted to show you guys some of our progress with our gardening and our home. I have some before and afters but mostly a lot of afters. I am such a bad picture taker so if anyone wants to follow me around all day and take pictures of my life you are more than welcome to. I am taking resumes, but its an unpaid position. Help me I'm poor!

Thanks to google maps this is what my house looked like before they remodeled it. Flowers flowers everywhere!

This is my house (and child) now. There is quite a difference between the two and we are planning on adding more to our garden. We are also planning on taking out the shrubs because they look bad. 

I don't have a before on this but here is the side of my house. I worked really hard on it today. I cannot wait for it to fill in more. When it does and my flowers start to bloom I will take another picture!

This side I actually did a before on. This is my before on the other side of my house. I have no clue what is weeds or plants or what type of flowers were there. 

This was the beginning stage of my starting to pull up everything. I have my little man as a helper!

This looks much better. Thanks to my amazing neighbor I found out I had two hydrangeas, a yucca plant, and a couple geranium plants. She said she doesn't know if the geranium and the yucca will do well since there isn't a lot of sun over here but If they don't do well this year I will *try* to transplant them to a sunny spot. Hopefully they do well so I don't kill them by trying to transplant them!

I did a lot of work today and my house is coming a long. We are going to figure out some sort of border to separate my lawn from the flower beds and we are going to re-mulch and put down a weed barrier. I will probably end up buying some more plants to so I can fill in some spaces but I definitely won't over crowd things. I will have it look like a cute neat little garden! If you have any suggestions on what I should do with my garden please leave a comment and let me know! I will take in any suggestions and I love to hear your feedback! 

Peace and Love,