Flower Beds

Here are the before and after yard pictures that I promised.  Here is a really really before.  This is the spring after we moved in.  No porch, no discernable flower beds.  Just some sad little tulips I planted amongst the rocks.

Here is what the front flower beds looked like just a few weeks ago at Easter…

And now.  Ahh.  Much better!

The lattice finishes off the porch nicely.  T also made me a spot to hang flower baskets, including running teeny tiny sprinklers up through the ceiling so the baskets will get watered twice a day on the sprinkler system!  Yay!  I’m terrible at remembering to water my baskets and in the summer heat and winds they need it at least once a day!

I was kind of lamenting the fact that we have this ring in the middle of our front yard.  Two different trees have been planted and subsequently died so I didn’t know what we were going to do with it.  T suggested a petunia hill.  Perfect!!!  I LOVE petunia hills!  I can’t wait for it to fill out!

In the back we used a much heavier medium.  My arms were slightly sore for about two weeks since I was doing about ten wheelbarrows of bark/gravel a day.  Any more than that and my back would let me know.  We raised the pea gravel 2-6 inches in the kids play area.  It was really low in some spots.  You can see under the fence and the sandbox in this before…

And no more spaces in the after!

The beds back there were totally nasty and weedy before we scraped and leveled this dirt…

And then landscaped cloth, and pea gravel-ed it.

Before…

And after!

Much nicer!  I feel like we are finally getting to  a place where we can start to enjoy our house and yard and not just see all the projects we have to do!  Of course there is always more to do when you are working with a very old house, but we’ve just about leveled the playing field.  No pun intended.