Gardening!

When we moved into our house there was a little area by the side of the deck with flowers growing and it looked great. The next summer only the tulips grew back. This summer after the tulips died we basically had an area of dirt with dead tulips, some weeds and some plants that we weren't sure about. After weeding and taking out the dead tulips...we had a "nice" area of dirt. :-\

We finally got around to fixing that and an area on the side of our house that was also full of weeds.

First let's look at the area of dirt, weeds and a few plants that we had planted earlier (I got them from someone at work). The plastic cover over the window basically served as a greenhouse and was filled with dead and thriving weeds. Yuck.

So we dug up the weeds...and grass.....

 

And then covered the area in weed block and planted our new plants.We planted citronella and hostas.

I didn't take any photos of this process but basically we just covered the area in weed block and used little staples to make it stay. Then we cut a little X on the spots where we wanted to plant something, dug a hole and planted away.

Then we replaced the window cover (which we had weeded, used weed block and filled with rocks), added a trim and filled it with mulch.

It makes such a difference!

Now we can see inside of the window cover and instead of it being full of weeds it just has rocks. 

 Here are some closer photos that show the edging a little better. The first photo is the citronella plant - it smells great. The second photo is a mystery plant - we have no idea what it is.

Now let's look at the side of our house...

There is a skinny area between the fence and the sidewalk that is part dirt/rocks and part concrete with a bunch of weeds added in.You can see a hosta on the side - we replanted this one on the side of our deck.

A close up of all of the weeds. Yuck.

We weeded the area and then put down the weed block.

Next we just filled it with rocks. Since portions of the area are partly concrete we didn't think it would work to plant flowers there. We put down two bricks to separate the lawn and the rock area.

We are so glad to finally have all of this done! We did the work over two days. Two very hot days. After we were finished we walked to a Mexican restaurant near our house and treated ourselves to dinner...and the biggest margarita we'd ever seen. :-)

Next we need to tackle the plants in the front. Blech.