Because I wouldn’t appreciate gardening as much as I do if it weren’t for my mother, I’ve decided to rerun this piece on DIY gardening. Keep in mind that fall is a great time to plant the bulbs you’d like to enjoy in spring, something that I need to keep in mind when I’m looking for a weekend project to do this month. Before you head to a gardening store to buy bulbs, see if someone might be giving some away on Freecycle. Long shot, I know, but worth a look-see.

When my husband, Bill, and I bought our first house, we couldn’t afford to hire a landscaper or a gardener. At the same time we weren’t going to live without some kind of garden. To make ends meet and to make ourselves happy, we decided to design and plant our garden ourselves.That said, we weren’t going to be stupid about how we planted our garden. We really didn’t want to see our hard-earned dollars wither up and die in the front yard.

The first thing Bill and I did was consult with the Penn State Co-op Extension’s website to find out which plants fared the best in our Pennsylvania “climate.” Next, because we noticed that there were as many deer on our street as there were kids on bikes, we knew we wanted to plant greenery that wouldn’t become deer food. My mother, who is a master gardener, suggested we look on Cornell University’s Co-op Extension website to find which plants deer don’t like so we could choose those. Finally, once we were armed with this information, we visited our local gardening center and started asking questions about various flowers, bushes and trees.

In addition to looking for greenery that fit our climate and anti-deer criteria, we wanted to see which colors looked good together. In about a day we had our garden planned out and we started digging.

Though we did our homework, we did make some wrong moves, such as the transplanted hosta from my mother’s yard–hey, it was free. It turned out that in planting the hosta, we’d set up a deer salad bar buffet. We pulled it all out and tossed it in the woods. I don’t care if the deer eat my hosta, just don’t do it near my front door. And even though Cornell listed phlox as being a deer-proof plant, it turns out that Upstate New York deer may not like it, but Southeastern Pennsylvania deer gobble it up as do deer in other parts of the state, as this DIY Network article shows. So into the woods the phlox went. However, the purple butterfly bush, yellow coreopsis and the blue-flowered myrtle ground cover all flourished.

Maybe it’s because Bill and I are do-it-yourself types that we enjoyed the process of creating our DIY garden–and look forward to doing it again in our new house. Our plan is to plant via xeriscaping, which is defined as choosing plants and landscaping greenery that does not require additional irrigation. Translated into English? A truly “green” garden that doesn’t need to be watered. Do I know anything about xeriscaping? Hell, no, but I’m looking forward to learning all I can about it and then putting my new-found knowledge to use.