Front Yard Fix-Up

Last weekend my mom and Brother came out to help me with a few projects around the house. My main focus was the front yard...its hideousness was driving me crazy.

Remember last summer when I when a small army ripped out those giant bushes in front of the house? Sometime after that we added lattice to the bottom of the front porch, but it was later in the fall and I didn't have time to get it painted. Anyway, that's how things sat for some time.

And this is basically how things looked:

It's OK, you can cringe. It wasn't pretty. You can't tell from these pictures very well, but the sides of these flower bed planter things basically didn't exist. The sides sort of just stopped and the ground sloped down, which was causing a lot of erosion, especially on the driveway side. 

The other thing you may notice, in the pic above...there is a line of big stones in the middle of the bed. At some point, I'm guessing that is where the original bed ended, but because the bushes got SO big, someone added another layer in front and filled it in with dirt. Nice. 

So our task was to dig up as many of those as possible to build up the sides and to provide more room for plants. Fun stuff.

I dug up a lot of stones while Brother worked on the sides. You can sort of see that in the pic above, but the pic below really shows his handiwork! Good job Brother!

After running to Home Depot and a local hardware store for some topsoil, mulch, and some select Garden Weasel tools, we started breaking up the soil and worked in peat moss and fresh topsoil. 

Nice, right?

Somewhere in there we went to the garden center and I spent WAY too much on plants and flowers.... but I bought mostly perennials because I am NOT doing this every year. Homie don't play that. 

We got the plants home and laid them out first, to make sure I liked how it all looked. Mom and Brother also put the flowers and things they picked out in the planters up on the porch. 

 

Once everyone was satisfied... the digging re-commenced. And then the mulching started. And then we ran out of mulch. 

The end. 

Not really. We ran to the HD again for more mulch. Mom insisted on buying a couple hanging ferns for my porch. 

So we finally finished the job and took a few minutes to admire everything. Doesn't it look amazing!? What a difference a hard day's work makes!!

 

I love it! Since this pic was taken, we added (at Mom's insistence) two hanging flower baskets. They're also very lovely. :)

And now I'm just trying not to kill everything!

The end.