The weather has gotten warm and I had/have a week of unpaid vacation. One thing I love about Holly is her willingness to make a decision and act quickly. On Monday morning, after we had fed the kids breakfast, we sent them all outside to play in the beautiful day. While sitting on our front porch, we stared at the dead grass and overall ‘blah’ part of our yard in front of our porch. With about five minutes of debate, we had the wheel barrel and shovel out and we started stripping it down.
Starting our project
About 30 minutes into the project, I told Holly, “This really has to work. I’ve always wanted to do landscaping work but I’m always afraid it will look horrible so this would be a great confidence booster!” My wife, even though she grew up at a greenhouse, has also never really done much of this so it was definitely a trial by fire! But we kept scooping away the layer of dirt, dead grass, and some live grass.
We decided to take the chunks of live grass and attempt to transplant it to a very dead part of our front yard. We don’t have high hopes that it will catch as we are probably not going to water it every day, but we needed a bunch of fill dirt for that section anyways so we figured, “why not?”
Then we decided that a small retaining wall and flower bed near our driveway was very misplaced so we raided the castle brick to line our new ‘area.’ The other flower bed will be filled with gravel and used to put our gliding bench… it’s a perfect spot to sit while the kids play on the driveway.
Dark Hardwood Mulch from Rose Hauling
Next we realized that we needed mulch. Two years ago we ordered three cubic yards of compost/top soil mix for our garden and it is still in great shape. So I hopped in my truck and drove over to Rose Hauling in Barboursville to check out their mulch. I brought Ben along for the ride as I figured he’d love to see the mounds of dirt and watch the loader drop the mulch in the truck bed. They actually fit two hards of dark hardwood mulch into my small truck!
The work isn’t finished, but I am very impressed with what we did in two days and for a total cost of $60 in mulch! Our finishing touches will probably include some stepping stones from the sidewalk to the side yard and another directly in front of the stairs leading to the grass. Then we’re thinking a classic stone bench for between the rose bush/azalea pairs (we transplanted the rose bush and azalea on the right too by the way). For the front part near the border, Holly is planning to do annual planters. Perhaps a supertunia? Yet another benefit of Holly’s family owning a greenhouse, she’s up there through Sunday and should come home with a minivan full of beautiful flowers from Arona Road Greenhouse! The bad part… she took my camera with her with all of the best pictures still on the memory card! The album will have to come later… maybe a follow up post with the finished results!
- Semi-finished product
I guess now we just have to replace the blinds on the second floor! We also remulched the entire front landscaping and surrounded the tree to the right with the castle brick. We also have to continue adding some fill dirt to the front yard ditch… wonder if that’s what I’ll be doing in the morning!!! After that it is fertilizer and seeding time.
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