For the last couple of weekends, Hal and I have been prepping our yard for installing a new garden.  Some of you may recall that when we purchased our home last fall, the builders installed the typical shrubs that I loathe….  See picture

The house BEFORE

As you can see, we have the standard low-lying shrubs….the sad thing is that the bulk of them were simply sitting in a hole because their roots never took.  That’s why you may notice that some of them are quite dead.

So last weekend we ripped out all but a 4 of the shrubs surrounding our house.  We also got rid of all that nasty pine straw…have I mentioned that I hate pine straw?  We literally had over 26 bags of pine straw.  Once we got all of that stuff up, we added garden soil and tilled it all together to prepare it for this weekend.

While we are far from done, we are so pleased with what we were able to accomplish today.  We added: perennials, annuals, irises, lilies, and a plant I cannot remember.  We’ll be adding some leafy shrubs and some ornamental grasses to fill in or use as edging.  But we’re maxed out on our budget for this project so we’ll add to it a little bit at a time.

The yard AFTER.  The leafy bushes in the rear will flower in the summer with cascading purple flowers.  The next line is the irises which will flower shortly in a light lemon color.  The small flowers in front are hard to see but they have stalks of purple bells.  And in front is a combination of perennials and annuals.

Please ignore the condition of our sod, the builder installed crappy sod so we are having to overseed in the hopes that new grass will fill in and grow where it’s currently dead.  We’ve watered, fertilized and nothing has helped…so we’re hoping that seeding helps.  I would really hate to have to re-sod.   Anyway, please enjoy a couple more close ups of our first foray into gardening.

The random tree in our front yard, which we hope to replace with a palm tree (a small one) at some point.

Side view of our front garden area, they haven’t flowered yet so it’ll look fantastic once it does.  We also chose some plants that would also spread out a bit.

Another view of the yard….the side yard (far left of this picture) will have two white trellises and we’ll be planting climbing roses.  This part of the yard faces the street so it needs a little something, but for now it also has black mulch.

Here’s a close up of most of the plants we purchased and planted.  Far right is the one that will have cascading purple flowers, the one on the far left is the lily, the one mid-right is a perennial, the two in front are annuals.  The one in the far right will spread as it flowers, as does the one in the middle-right.  We’ll be filling in as we have extra money.  I love the colors and textures and can’t wait for all of them to flower.

So as we’ve reflected: 44 bags of black mulch, 8 bags of gardening soil, dozens of new plants and flowers, dirty nails, and lots of watering later….we’re really pleased with the outcome.  Hope you’ve enjoyed this post of gardening by a novice.