A Facelift At Cornerstone

Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.  Genesis 1:11-12

Our church, Cornerstone Baptist Church of Jennings, voted at a business meeting to undertake a landscaping project to hopefully beautify the front of the church.  A couple of boxwood shrubs had done their best anchoring down either side of the sanctuary for many years, but it was time for some freshening and rejuvenation.

A tractor was brought in to uproot and pull out the old boxwoods and then till up the area proposed for the new flower bed.  We arrived on a beautiful Saturday morning to begin the work.

A pile of topsoil was delivered the day before.  This was the biggest challenge and proved to be the hardest work - moving the pile of dirt.  Inch by inch, it's a cinch.

We didn't have any mechanical equipment, so we opted for the second best thing - shovels and a wagon.  It was hard work, but you couldn't have asked for a more perfect day - a bluebird day, you might call it.  We loaded wagon after wagon and pulled the wagon into the bed and dumped it.  Repeating the process again and again until we had the bed filled up with fertile topsoil.  We left one end open with no landscape border until we filled it all up with dirt and then we erected the last metal border.

Then we got the shrubs unloaded.  We had purchased them from a local nursery we like to use.  We selected "Knockout Roses" for the central point under the stained glass window where the baptistry is and then flanked on either side by loropetalum.  We carefully arranged them, measuring for uniform placement.

Then we dug holes and planted them, following up by raking a good layer of mulch over the exposed dirt.

At last we were finished.  We enjoyed a Popeye's Spicy Chicken Sandwich as we rested and looked at the transformation.  The plants will grow and fill in the open spaces soon enough.  The roses and loropetalum will bloom and flourish and beautify the spots they occupy (as we should do, right?).

Tricia watered them in and committed to doing so for the next couple of weeks to ensure the new plants get rooted and get a good start.

This turned out to be a good project - one of those where you really could see the results of your work just four short hours later.