Hello from NC

Hello everybody. I'm a middle age mom to a large family, who relocated to NC 12 years ago from Ontario Canada. Six years ago we built a new house and had the standard landscaping around the front foundation planted. Over the next year or two we added a few gardens along a front to backyard walkway and a couple along our one property line. But there is much more to do.

Raising our children including homeschooling them keeps me fairly busy, but my "baby" is 4 now and I'm finding myself with more and more time to enjoy outdoors. Since I now have no infant to hold nor toddler that needs my constant watch I'm set to work while the children play together in the yard.

Our gardens back in Ontario were much easier to dig in. Here I'm dealing with rocks and hard clay. It's going to be one of my biggest hurdles in seeing all the plans I visualize come to a reality. I like semi formal to formal gardens and have been obsessively searching for English Garden plans and ideas.

Our planting time is quickly approaching, another month or two, and I'm ready to see what I can get done this year.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to learning lots from all of you.

Welcome, Katherine! Hmm, maybe I should move up to Ontario, because we deal with lots of rocks and clay here, too.
Have you found the Carolina gardening forum yet? I'm sure you'll get lots of helpful info from the nice folks there:
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/f/region_carolinas/all/

Good morning Katherine, how nice to have you join in on the fun!

Oh Heaven's to Betsy yes, the rocks and clay seem to abound around here too, and make it so hard to dig in. Have you tried compost yet? That seems to work really well in my yardening areas, I just get bags of the stuff (or truck loads), dump it into the bed(s) at preparation time, and grab the gardening fork to mix mix mix. I use it on my lawn, too.

Well, enjoy your visits here, and I look forward to seeing you around! =)