Flagstone path laid down in bean – check!

Mulch removed from in front of porch – check!

Gorgeous new lighting installed to replace these el-cheepo we hated them so much solar lights – check!

die ugly light, die!

Giant boulder moved into bean (nearly crushing Peter’s wrist in the process) – check!

Sore back, headache and tons of dirty laundry – check, check and CHECK!

Still to come:

An even more gigantical boulder to be moved (why did we think it was a good idea to let Alethea pick a rock at the landscaping store?)

Finish putting down river rock where mulch used to be.

Fill in cracks of flagstone path and tidy up bean.

More laundry.

And of course…

PICTURES!

…stay tuned…

Okay, I know it only got to around fifty degrees today, but a few days ago it was hot and humid enough that we had our air conditioning on for the first time, so summer has got to be just around the corner.  To prepare for its arrival, I’ve gotten all my new plants in the ground, and just for fun I took a picture to compare The Bean now to The Bean at this time last year:

‘The Bean’ – March 2010
(How it looked when we bought the house, minus the two trees we had removed)

‘The Bean’ – April 2010
(After a thorough weeding and a whole bunch of mulch)

‘The Bean’ – May 2011
(Some plants were added in 2010 and more this spring)

I’m still not crazy about how The Bean (or the lawn) looks, but it is nice to see that there has been improvement over the last 13 months.  And I’m sure everything will look better once the flowers are actually in bloom.

Come on Summer!

Okay, so I know today is Lydia’s two month birthday, but you’re going to have to wait for her update until Monday, because that’s when she goes to the doctor to get weighed and measured, so I’ll finish her two month post then.

In the mean time let me bore you to death entertain you by showing off my just completed landscaping plan for spring/summer 2011.  As many of you will remember, we have a large raised bed in our front yard that we have lovingly nicknamed ‘The Bean’ because of it’s kidney shape.  After a lot of research and internal debate I have finally placed orders for the plants I am going to kill attempt to grow this year in an effort to make The Bean more attractive.

Because I am anal retentive like things to be planned carefully in advance, I made a scale drawing of The Bean, scanned it, and added plant photos to help me lay things out.

So without further ado, here is The Bean Plan 2011:

As you can see, I’m dreaming of a colorful garden mixed with trees, shrubs and perennials all accented by a lovely winding flagstone path, complete with a bench on which to sit and relax.  And while I’m dreaming, I’m going to imagine that not just my plants, but my children as well, are so perfectly behaved that I have plenty of time to just sit and admire God’s creation all around me.  Ahhhh… isn’t it a wonderful vision?

The reality is that I’m not sure how many of my plants from last year will have made it through the winter and from experience I can tell you that the ones coming in the mail for spring planting will be so small they’re almost invisible sweet little baby plants that may not flower during their first season.  Add that to the fact that we are not even sure if we will be tackling Operation Garden Path this year and the resulting picture is a Bean full of wood chips far less idyllic.

Oh well.  Peter and I are hoping to live in this house until we can’t make it up the front steps any longer, so I figure we should have a few more years to achieve the perfectly planned, but still slightly wild looking garden of my dreams.  In the mean time, I’ll just have to content myself with admiring my fabulous diagram.

Our lawn was pretty shabby when we first moved in.  Since our house was as foreclosure, the yard went for a whole summer without any attention before we moved in.  This summer we’ve put quite a bit of work into getting the yard cleaned up and weeded and keeping the lawn watered and mowed and fertilized.

And we are making progress.  In fact, for a while this summer we were only the second worst lawn in the neighborhood.  Granted the worst lawn belonged to an unoccupied home, but it was still nice to not be the worst.  Tonight when we were out on our walk we noticed that the house is no longer vacant and the new owner was out spraying weeds… we may shortly be back to being the worst.

Even though having a patchy lawn isn’t entirely our fault, our neighbors don’t seem to appreciate looking at it.  A few weekends ago after we were up north sailing with Peter’s family, we arrived home to find that two different neighbors had planted shrubbery along our property line while we were away.  One neighbor plants stuff and you figure they just wanted to do some landscaping, two neighbors though… probably not a coincidence.

I guess we’ll just have to make it our goal for next year to make it out of the bottom two.