a little hole digging help here...

I am desperate to get all the hole-digging work that I can think of done  ASAP, now that I know my best worker is going to start a summer job life-guarding and swim lesson teaching in about ten days. I picked him up today and he did a great job. There were about eight azaleas I had been brutal with last summer, having seriously whacked to get down to a size that would more easily/safely transplant with likelihood of survival. I had talked to someone who called in response to the Craig's List 'free to a good home' adv. for big Formosa azaleas, and she asked if I had any thing smaller than a car that I wanted to get rid of. She came and looked, and I thought she was going to come back and get them: but no... she said, when I finally called, after waiting weeks for her to come and dig, that they had just bought some at a nursery.

Well crap: now I have to pay someone to dig them up and relocate. So my #1 hole-digger did that today, relocating all the pink blooming azaleas to a new home, out in the leaf-mulch under the trees in the front yard.Then he dug a nice trench in the place where the azaleas had been. We added all manner of 'amendments': manure, peat, perlite, osmocoate and stirred it all up.

Then I got a big  pot of 'what-ever-it-is' (something that has a geranium-shaped leaf, and puts out a stalk about eight or ten inches tall with tiny white blooms interspersed along the stem) that I fell for at the Callaway plant sale last spring. When I bought it over a year ago, I was told it needs dividing, so you can imagine how it looked when it came out of the pot. C. put them in the nice rich dirt, along with fern starts and astilbe I'm hoping will be happy there in the shade.

They are in a place that never gets full sun, but lots of light. By the time the sun gets overhead, and they would be in direct sun-light, the trees on the west side of the house will provide enough shade that I don't think there is any chance they will burn up. I wish I had more ferns to put out - hope that they will do well, and I can keep it wet enough. Even with all that peat added in, it is on a slope that water would drain out of, so until they get established, I will have to keep well watered.