I am loving driving up to my house and seeing our front garden looking so good!
>I started by pulling everything out of the garden except for the pampas in the corner. That was a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. Those bushes had some freakishly long roots! (check out the picture below)
>There were a lot of weeds and old bark and some type of radish plants growing all in the garden so I dug out a ton of the dirt and wheel burrowed it to the back yard to spread in our many holes we have going on back there (that's another huge project :/). We then sprayed some Round-Up all over the bed to try and kill any remaining weeds.
>We got the stones from Lowes and laid one row down and another row standing up behind. The idea is to be able to put the mower wheel along the row laying down and cut the grass all the way up to the bed. We will see if this works, I got the idea from Pinterest. We love the element it adds against the brick house.
>The next weekend I went to Sanders Nursery and picked out the plants for the garden. I went with 3 Golden Boxwood bushes, a butterfly bush in the far corner, annual flowers all through the front, and some purple perennials that I forgot their name in front of the pampas.
>I hadn't realized how much dirt I had dug out until we had to fill it all back up! We used about 30 bags of top soil with some bags of manure mixed in. Once we got the plants in the soil and patted down, we spread Back to Nature, a top spread mulch type soil, all around the plants and bed to help with moisture and nourishment. Kyle and I both agreed it smells like the zoo, but don't worry it's already going away.
>We still have a little gap to the right of the boxwood bushes that we plan to fill with a tallish type bush to give it a little more balance but other than that we are done and super happy with the result!
Before
After
Who would have thought we would be landscapers! It was a fun and good experience, I can't wait to watch it grow!
-N
