Although we felt like we were “done” last week when we shared our landscaping progress, we found that there was still more to do over the past week. Since we had guests staying with us over the weekend, we actually managed to organize everything that we had lying around, run a load of trash to a dumpster, cut up the large iron railing we’ve had by our garage for a year, and clean our driveway. And thanks to a generous gift of hostas and a sale at our local Bachman’s, we were also able to fill up just about all of the real estate in our new gardens in the front yard and along the alley.
So it’s looking a lot more filled in. And slowly but surely our grass is starting to grow. After waiting for our little blades to pop out, I totally understand why people shell out for sod. The joy of instant gratification. But this way, we get to literally watch it grow, and it has certainly been helped by all the rain here lately.
We also took some of our wild and crazy mint from the far side of our garage and moved it over towards our container garden.
As we learned quickly, mint (and chives) grows and spreads like crazy. So Dain had the idea to try and contain the creeping by using a plastic pot to corral it in the ground. He took some plastic pots we had from plant purchases, cut off the bottoms, and buried them in the ground. Then he put the mint inside the pot.
And here’s how it looks all nicely contained (for now anyways). On the far side, we have the orange mint from the farmers’ market this year. And the two across from it are chocolate mint and pineapple mint that we transplanted from our out of control mint selection on the other side of the garage. We’ll know next year whether or not it worked.
And as I mentioned before, our local Byerly’s has a Bachman’s stand set up in the parking lot. And since it is getting towards the end of the planting season, the plants finally went on sale for 50% off. So we couldn’t resist picking up a few more perennials to complete our garden. And my favorite plant brand is the PW or Proven Winners. Because how could you go wrong with a PROVEN Winner?
We really are not experts on plants, but we just read the tags to see what kind of light and soil they need. And then we try to place them based on the predicted height and spread listed on the tag.
And after our plants were in the ground, we started to add a little rock border along the driveway with rocks that we found in our yard. We still need a few more to complete the look, but we think it adds a little something.
We also didn’t forget the alleyway. We spruced it up by adding some hostas and a few other plants.
And my dad was nice enough to give us 12 Loyalist hosta plants for along the path down to the backyard. So it is all coming together.
And in case you’re a plant nut, we put together a little diagram to label all of our plants. We’ve already given you the low down on our container garden, but here are the rest of them.
- Day Lilies
- Porcupine Grass
- Weigela
- Lemon Balm
- Moonshadow Euonymous
- Wooly Thyme
- Mystery Plant (transplanted from our yard)
- Dwarf Astilbe
- Giles Van Hees Veronica
- Chocolate Mint
- Pineapple Mint
- Orange Mint
- Annual Flowers
- Blue Fescue
- Tiny Rubies
- Firewitch
- Sedum
- Hosta
- Dwarf Iris
- Hidcote Blue Lavendar
- Emerald Creeping Phlox
So there you have it. We are officially done updating our front garden progress. And now we’re going to move on to some other projects we’ve had on the back burner…..like cleaning our gutters, repairing cracks in our front steps, organizing our garage, and creating a pantry in our kitchen. Stay tuned for all of that.
