Spring Planting

We took advantage of the beautiful spring weekend to do some landscaping around our yard. Our house had quite a bit of landscaping already, but there wasn't any color at all so we tried to fill in some places and plant some things that will bloom.

Here is the before and after of one side of the front flower bed.

Before:

After: The green hedge bush in the middle is from the backyard; hopefully it will survive the transplant! We planted one new bush and we planted several perennials (columbine, lenten rose) behind the monkey grass that will bloom later this spring.

Monkey grass is a personal favorite of hers.

Here is a before shot of the flower bed at the back of our house. We moved the two living bushes to the beds in the front and pulled out the dead stuff. We planted three double knock-out rose bushes in that area-- two red and one pink.

One of our new rosebushes: We have a row of crape myrtles along our side fence in the backyard and we wanted to plant some colorful shrubs in the space in between. We went with azaleas and camellias. The bushes are small now, but they should grow to be 4' wide by 5' tall.
Camellias bloom in the winter, and here's a picture of the last flower that remains.

The azaleas bloom spring, summer and fall, and here's a picture of the first bloom that has appeared.

It was a lot of work to prepare the beds, till the soil, dig the holes, and plant everything--- probably a lot more work than it looks like it would be judging from these pictures. Everything looks really good, though, and we're crossing our fingers that we can keep everything alive! We're looking forward to a few years from now when the things that we've planted have grown and filled out.

Unfortunately, we ran into some trouble when we went to work on the flowerbed on the left side of the front of our house. We had noticed that area hadn't been draining well but as we started stepping in and raking that side, it became clear that we had a bit of a water problem. The flowerbed is the consistency of mulch soup and there is an expansive puddle in the grass.

There are a few things that could be responsible. It could be a clogged gutter that caused too much of the recent rains to dump on that spot, a leak/brake in the sprinkler system, or a busted waterline underground. Hopefully it's not the latter. We peeked into the crawl space and there isn't any water under the house, thank goodness. Kolby is going to check things out tomorrow and probably call out a sprinkler repairman or plumber. If anyone has any ideas of what may be going on here... we're always open to the idea of not having to pay someone to come out and fix something!

So that's our weekend in a nutshell. Kolby and I have been working opposite schedules lately-- he's been teaching SAT classes from 4-9ish so we only see each other for 1-2 waking hours on any given day-- so it was really nice to spend some time doing something together!