Mailbox Tub Garden

We are still very much working on our long-term front garden-yard plans, and we’re far from completion.  A little each year, as we need to roll, but we’ve enjoyed the planning and the progress along the way.  We always wish we were further ahead than behind, but that’s the way it goes.

Our mailbox out front by the street, has really been looking like it needs some sprucing up, for some time.  Last year, we just planted some flowers around the post, in what sandy and rocky sloped dirt was there.  But because our front yards are our garden, and the general landscape plan is not completed yet, it didn’t look so nice.  The crabgrass that grows in the sandy dirt, spread into flower bed, and it just didn’t look clean. So this year, I had a new plan.

To have a little tub garden, around the mailbox post. I figured, filled with loam, it would keep the crabgrass from spreading into the garden bed.

I picked up this aluminum tub for cheap, at my favorite antique/junk stop. I had passingly mentioned to Michael, that I had wanted to put the mailbox further to one side, than the other. But I didn’t make a point of it yet, because in my mind, I imagined he planned to just cut out the entire bottom of the tub. But next thing I knew, I had found this done.  A square cut out smack-dab in the middle, with drilled drain holes here & there.  Of course, I went through my typical reaction to these things:  “MI-CHAAAAAEL!”….and reminded him that I had mentioned to him, I wanted the post to the left.

He thought it would “look fiiiiine”, and proceeded to put the mailbox through the tub, and into the new hole he dug. (We were moving the mailbox over as well, closer to our driveway.

This situation is such a symbolic picture of US, by the way.  Michael and I, I mean.  He is all about liking things symmetrical, and I prefer asymmetrical.  He’s a ruler follower, and I’m a rule breaker. He likes new and perfect, I like things old and full of character.  He’s conservative in style, and I am SO not.  He’s even, and I’m odd.

Oh…wait.  🙄 Well anyway…

It was not yet filled with dirt, but I got the visual, and it just wasn’t right to me. So ….. boring, and non-creative, in my eyes.  So I proceeded to tell him, that it looked ridiculous, as I knew it would, in the center.  It was no big deal to cut the existing hole another square bigger, to the left, so we could move the whole tub over (thus appearing that the post had moved over, lol), and that’s just what he did.  If only to shut-me-up. : )   (We nag because it works, right? And because…..they don’t do what we say the first time!)

Kidding. I respect my husband.  I just have a little more flare, and fight, in me.  Or, a lot. Maybe.

MUCH better!  Right?

(I mean….I couldn’t take a photo of it center. I just couldn’t.  But can’t you imagine?)

He loaded it with the loam, and I planted my flowers.

Calibrachoa and Snap Dragons, to be exact.

Crabgrass can’t touch this!

So what was your vote?  Center, or off-center?  How would you have done it?

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