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.

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.

Replanting the kitchen window box with succulents

Good news, everyone! I planted some succulents! (Big wow, I know.) 

We have this pass-through from our kitchen to our family room. Once upon a time, it was an external window and I'm so glad whoever put the family room addition onto our house didn't close it in. Although it's more or less functionless as an actual pass-through, I love the open feel it gives between the two rooms.

But there's this strange little window box at the base. When we moved in, the previous homeowners had left a bunch of junk like receipts and business cards stuffed in there, and I knew that I had to do something to keep myself from doing the same. Plants were a perfect solution. No temptation to pile anything on top of plants! 

The ones I had in here previously died a while ago. I am embarrassed to admit how long the pots have been vacant, especially when it only took a few minutes to put in new ones.