Weekend Project: Front Yard Landscaping

This past weekend I set out to finally conquer the front yard flower beds, another one of my goals for the first three months of this year. I wish pictures could do it justice, because the situation was pretty much out of control...

See how you can't even tell where the yard stops and the flower weed bed begins? Like I said, out of control.

When I bought the house in Nov 2009, the front yard wasn't in the best shape, but it was manageable. Over the past year, however, I'm not so proud to say that I just ignored it. As in a 4ft dandelion was growing next to the sidewalk I use every day type of ignoring. I'm kicking myself for not taking a better picture of that beauty, but here's a similar one in the side yard (a well hidden area... good project for wayyy down the road haha).

Anyway, I brainstormed a few different ideas about what to do with the front yard. The bushes I had were in okay shape if I were to trim them up and weed the bed, but there was still that annoying empty space in front of the big window, previously occupied by some unknown type of bushes that were dead when I moved in (thanks Dad for pulling those up!).

So I decided to just clear the whole bed. Some of the big bushes were growing over the smaller ones and all in all I figured it would be easier to start from scratch. Saturday morning I got to work clearing out the weeds and digging up the bushes. Luckily, my neighbor volunteered to help, which saved me a lot of digging time. I cut the branches off of each bush, and then we busted out the big guns... can I get a high-five for Texas, land of the pickup truck?

Here's a shot after 8 hours of work on Saturday (with some help from Sam). I left behind the five small bushes thinking they were small enough that I could probably dig them up and move them to the backyard, because really, why get rid of so many perfectly good plants?

Then Sunday when I was at Lowes I saw similar size Nandinas selling for $10 each, and I figured it was totally worth spending $50 later to not have to dig holes in the backyard anytime soon. What can I say, I was sore from Saturday's weeding-fest. A couple of hours later Sam and I had dug up all the roots and loosened up the dirt enough to make a nice pretty bed.

While I was weeding and digging up the old bed, I found some plastic bed edging buried under there from who knows when, and luckily I was able to reuse it. One less trip to Lowes! All of the rocks you see in the back were also around the front edge of the bed before, but I'm not sure what we will do with all of those yet.

Now just waiting for new bushes this weekend! Not sure yet what I am going to go with, I'm going to try to keep it basic and see what the folks at the nursery recommend. Oh and please excuse the extra long grass, it has since been mowed :)

Oh, and there's a bonus! This tiny little bed is so small and random that I was never really sure what to do with it, so I figured it might be a decent use for some of the rocks I dug up from around the edges of the old bed. Plus, we've kind of been wanting an easy little herb garden, so I bought basil, mint, rosemary and cilantro for $3.50 each and planted them right in there! Even used a bit of basil for dinner last night - Sam was pretty excited to pick it right from our own plant.

Any of you been up to major weekend projects? I'm cutting it a little close on my goal to finish the front yard landscaping by the end of March, but hopefully I'll make good progress replanting this weekend!