The Front Yard is Done

The front of our house for a while looked like this, with the green shutters and the awkward garden bed.

Then we had the fence installed and the shutters and trim painted.

Awkward garden bed remained.

But this was the plan:

A few weeks ago we had some lovely yard folks clear out the garden bed, expand it to be parallel with the front porch, and rototiller in about 10 bags of compost to amend the soil. They failed to remove all of the tree roots from the VERY large tree nearby, which made the digging of holes ROUGH.

I then went with a co-worker of mine to pick out plants for the front bed and thank the sweet baby Jesus that we had his help. He worked his tail off helping us... LB almost died pushing this cart without the benefit of vision.

We got home and my co-worker and I spaced everything out on the weed blocker goodness that our yard guys had put down. 

I did too much that weekend...

...but we got everything in and two weeks later, EVERYTHING IS STILL ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's a miracle!

We planted everything and then went to get soaker hoses. In hindsight, I probably would have opted for spray soaker hoses so that we wouldn't have to be soooooo careful about where to try to bury them. But we are doing soaker hoses for about an hour at night and then a quick spray watering as well. 

We also just got about 20 bags of mulch from Home Depot, LB spread it all around, and we called it a day. 

I am quite happy with my new view from the front porch.

As fall and winter come, I have no idea what I am supposed to do/not do, so let's just hope I can keep these babies alive.