Backyard landscaping: Year two

My backyard landscaping isn't doing great. Last year, I started from bare dirt and planted a whole lot of things. Some purchased, some given to me. But the only thing that came back from winter was a whole lot of failure. Well, that's not totally true. The lamb's ear went from a few of these sad-looking transplants:

to this:

This is my kind of plant. No water, no attention, and spreads like crazy. Well done, lamb's ear, well done.

But other than that, everything I planted last year has been a disappointment.

Juniper: dead. (Likely my fault.)

Purple fountain grass: dead. (Turns out I didn't know our zone number last year. Lesson learned. Don't trust that a plant labeled "perennial" is truly a perennial unless it's also labeled with your zone number.)

Ferns: came back, but still pretty small.

Iris: came back, but again, puny. It's probably a slow grower.

Hostas: about half of them came back, but all still very small.

Bleh.

As a reminder, I have imposed a rule that everything I plant has to be drought tolerant and easy to care for. I am not interested in high maintenance plants. I've got a whole lot of bare dirt to cover, so let's start round two.

I decided I needed some height, so I bought a bush from a local nursery. (Yes, one bush. Wouldn't want to rush things.)

This one is called Little Henry sweetspire. Elise likes to hug it and say, "I love Little Henry!" It has these long white cone flowers, and when in full bloom, it looks like it's covered in caterpillars. A weird looking plant, but we like weird around here.

I added in some decorative rocks that were tucked away in the corner of our property. Some are geodes, some are granite, others are some type of lava rock, I think. All kind of craggly and oddly shaped.

While I was at the nursery, I also grabbed a couple of fillers/ground covers.

First, to plant at the base of some large trees, I found this shade perennial Lamium "White Nancy." (Yes, I brought "Henry" and "Nancy" home from the nursery.) The label says it grows in part shade or full shade. Drought tolerant, animal resistant. Fast spreading. Basically indestructible, right? We will see. It's doing OK for now.

Then, for a sunnier area, I got some catmint "Walker's Low." Also drought tolerant, animal resistant. "Weed choking." It's saying all of the right buzz words. It's supposed to get about 18-24" tall/wide. It's right next to the lamb's ear, so I hope they play well together.

I'm being hyper-vigilant about keeping everything well watered for a few weeks. I can't deal with any more failures!

Landscaping intervention, Part 2: Let's rock!

Onto part two of my landscaping intervention!

Um... you can see why it needed an intervention. My hostas are doing awesome, actually, but you would never notice because the weeds were stealing all the focus.

This is an area I don't see everyday, or even every week. I have to make a special effort to go see it. It's out of sight/out of mind and tends to become overgrown with weeds. Like, this overgrown or worse. (Take my word for it. Much worse.)

Mulch would help, certainly, but as I noted before, this area is large (4 x 36 feet) and would probably require something like 12 or 15 bags of mulch. For just this area. To me, that's a lot of wasted money, effort and time every year, especially for a space that we don't really get to enjoy. 

My overall landscaping goal is to make everything as low maintenance as possible and it doesn't get any more low maintenance than rock. Well, concrete, I guess, but who wants more concrete in their life? Rock it is.

First, I needed to clean things up. A couple of hours pulling weeds and it was looking better already.

I went with bagged rock from Lowe's. I'm not sure if this was the cheapest way to go; I didn't look into alternatives like a load of rock from a landscaping materials place. We don't have a place to dump a load of rock that wouldn't require hauling it around the entire house. It just didn't make sense in this situation. We ended up with 35 bags of rock at $3.58 each, so with tax, just around $125 total.

I added the curve of flagstones for some added visual interest, and to remedy one area where water spills over from the gutters during heavy downpours and erodes the soil. You can see how the dirt has splashed up onto the house in that area. (The gutters are clean and we have screens to keep out gutter clogging junk. It's just weird roof design and I'm not sure there's much we could do about it.)

So with a couple of stones placed just so, I worked them into a larger curving design so they wouldn't look like islands floating in a sea of gravel.

But I'll let you in on a little secret. The real reasons I used the flagstones at all were because a) we already owned them. They were all salvaged from underneath the broken concrete in our backyard.  I am all about using what you already have. And b) working them into the landscape cut down on the amount of rocks we had to buy. I can't begin to guess by how much, but certainly a significant percentage.

Dan and I started spreading the rock, but soon realized we needed some type of edging to keep the rocks from spilling into our neighbor's driveway. The project grows!

Plastic edging was about 75 percent of the price of concrete edging pavers. This area has a high probability of getting stepped on and given that it's so close to the neighbor's driveway, it even has the possibility of being driven on (accidentally, of course). I went with the long-term solution: concrete pavers.

These are not actually "edging" pavers. They are 6x9 inch stones meant to lay flat, but they were the right color and the right price and real edging pavers are similarly 5-6 inches in height. They were also from Lowe's for 81 cents each (just over a dollar per linear foot). I bought 48, so $42.55 with tax for all.

I dug a narrow trench with a flat shovel and laid the stones lengthwise. It probably took 2-3 hours to do the whole line of them (completed in multiple sessions). After all the edging was in, I spread the rest of the rock in a thick layer (probably 2-3 inches). And done (finally)!

It looks a thousand times better, and I no longer feel like a bad neighbor! It's not perfect or professional-looking, but at least it looks like I'm trying. Considering that this area was bare dirt when we moved in four years ago, we can call it progress.

I am already discovering this is not a fool-proof way to keep out weeds. They just keep coming no matter what you do! But now maybe a five-minute weed-pulling session every week will be sufficient.

Landscaping intervention, Part 1: Painted drain pipe

About a month ago, I mentioned that tackling the neglected area on the side of our house was on my short list. It's a long, narrow strip of dirt (about 4 x 36 feet!) right next to our neighbor's driveway. 

And it's kind of weird because that line along the concrete is the property line. Where I come from, property lines are vague distinctions far off in the grass, not five feet from the side of the house. But it is what it is. Luckily, they are nice neighbors.

My dad kicked off improving the space by burying a drainage pipe last month, and I'm using that as a spring board to motivate myself to finish off the space.

First things first (well, easy things first): painting the short length of PVC drain pipe sticking up above ground. The pipe is great and doing its job, but the obvious white PVC-ness of it all was looking cheap. And that printed label on the pipe wasn't super attractive.

After wiping the pipe clean, I masked off the area with a couple pieces of cardboard. I wrapped a newspaper around the aluminum downspout and kind of shoved it inside the PVC, but I didn't use tape anywhere!

Then I used everyone's favorite spray paint, Rust-oleum's oil rubbed bronze. It's a paint and primer in one and it adheres to plastic (important!). It's not exactly a match to the brown downspout, but I'm OK with that. I just wanted the PVC to look like metal or clay or something other than white plastic, and the oil rubbed bronze color blends nicely.

See what I mean? Much better! This is one of those details that takes five minutes, and that no one but me is ever going to notice on its own, but it affects the way the area looks as a whole.

Disregard all of those weeds and the spray paint on the dirt. We'll save those for next time.

Let the landscaping begin! Swapping out overgrown bushes

I've pretty much always hated the Rose of Sharon bushes that were in the front of our house. My hate only grew stronger last spring when hundreds (no exaggeration) of tiny shoots sprouted and I spent hours pulling them up.

When we moved in, they were much much smaller. Now they were as tall as the gutters, encroaching on the porch, blocking light into the house (in the summer, they get much leafier) and generally annoying me. I thought it better to get them out before they got any bigger.

At my invitation, my dad came over and got to work cutting them up. He makes these kinds of jobs look easy. What took him 30 minutes probably would have taken me all day.

While he was ripping them out, I ran to Lowe's to pick up something for another project and found myself wandering through the garden section. In a fit of impulse, I picked up three boxwoods for $11 each and brought them home. My dad planted the first two. I planted the last one after transplanting some perennials to make room.

Boxwoods are pretty low maintenance. They need a trim once a year, but overall, they are perfect for a non-gardener like me. And unlike the Rose of Sharons, which are essentially sticks in the winter, the boxwoods are evergreen. They look a little scrawny now, but they should grow to about three to four feet wide and tall, topping out just under the window.

I can't get over how open it feels and how the house looks so much cleaner. I know I still have a bit of work to do in this bed (and all over), but this is a good start.

Hello early spring! My bargain tree returns

The $11 prairifire crabapple tree we planted last fall is actually blooming and alive. Hot pink! Not that I had serious doubts it wouldn't come back. But when you plant what is essentially a bare stick in the ground, you have to wonder. Grow, tiny tree, grow!

The $11 tree experiment

After taking out a couple of dying trees, our backyard was starting to feel empty. I wanted to replace the smaller red bud with another flowering tree and I wanted to get it in the ground before winter. No more tree procrastination!

So off we went to Lowes to grab something, and surprise! They were all on clearance -- 50% off! There wasn't much left to choose from, but I guess it was late October. It's been so warm around here lately, I didn't feel like it was too late to plant.

Anyway, we picked up this Prairifire Crabapple for only $11.49! Crazy.

It's kind of dinky and sickly looking now (then again, isn't every autumn tree?), so that's why I'm considering this an experiment of sorts.

Hopefully, this is what it will look like in the spring when it blooms. Such a pretty red!

My original plan was to set it back in the yard around where the other one was planted, but that area is very shady most of the day and the dwindling selection at Lowes was all full-sun trees.

So tree in hand, we moved up our planting spot closer to the driveway. It will get a lot more sun here, and when the tree gets bigger, it should provide some privacy from the street and the neighbors.

This picture makes me laugh. My husband isn't very handy. (Sorry for outing you, Dan.) I've got him beat hands down in that department. Somehow he made it to age 35 without ever planting a tree, so I coached him along while he was digging the hole.

The leaves still hanging on are a nice deep red color. I'm excited to see what spring brings!

........................................................

In other tree related news...

The old stumps that were cluttering up the planting beds are gone! (We uncovered these stumps after removing a bunch of overgrown vines last year, and like many things, weren't aware of them when we bought the house.)

My dad came over while we were out of town a few weekends ago and completely took them out. There is no sweeter gift than surprise yardwork, my friends. Spread the news.

This photo is not that exciting because showing you what's not there is difficult, but the stump was right there in that empty space in the middle of the photo. A bit of a hole in the landscaping, but we'll deal with that next spring.

Crooked tree, crooked tree

My backyard is looking a little naked.

It started when we had this dying and crooked maple tree removed. It wasn't doing well, and during every thunderstorm, I had that nagging thought in the back of my head that it just might come down. On the neighbor's house.

Dying trees don't really improve with time, so we bucked up and forked over the big bucks to have it removed by professionals.

Then it was on to tree #2. A much smaller red bud that was even more crooked.

This tree had been on the downhill slide for a while, and the trunk was completely rotted out. I wasn't worried about it coming down onto anything, but I wanted to remove it now so that we could plant a replacement before winter.

It was in such bad shape, I was convinced we just might be able to push it over with our bare hands. Elise and I tried, and while the tree gave quite a bit and a couple of large chunks broke off, it wasn't going anywhere. So my dad came over to cut it up with a chainsaw.

Now it's gone and the yard feels empty. I'm open to any and all suggestions for a small flowering tree to replace the red bud. Part sun/part shade. Anybody have any recommendations?

Bye bye backyard concrete

Before

Outside our back door, we have a lot of cracked up concrete. Some of it's part of a sidewalk, but then there are parts that are totally function-less. They aren't flat. (They weren't poured flat.) It's just weird, broken, useless concrete. That's an old photo above; the fence is long gone and the garage door has also been updated.

Removing it was on the long-term to-do list, but you know, not a major priority.

Non-impressive after

But while he was over working on the porch in front, my dad decided he would take some of it out. I guess he just felt like demolishing something, and when someone wants to help with a laborious task like breaking up concrete, I'm not going to turn them down.

Turns out the concrete was poured over a bed of flagstones. Not the smartest thing to do. No wonder it was cracked and broken.

We salvaged what we could of the flagstone, so after repurposing my former flagstone stash into a border, I now have a new stash to repurpose into something else.

About 50 square feet of concrete gone and a whole lot more to go...