Beware, this post has a lot of pictures of things that are probably self explanatory, but I took the pictures, so might as well use them, right? When we left off, I had cleared all the beds, turned up the soil and resurrected the plastic landscaping barrier:
So the first thing I did this weekend was go to a local nursery to buy new bushes. I had looked some at Lowes and Home Depot, and although the 3-gal bushes were attractively priced (~$10 each), I knew I would be frustrated waiting forever for those little tiny things to grow in and look normal. So I splurged a bit and bought nine $35 boxwoods. I chose the boxwoods because I like that they are simple and easy to maintain, and also my front yard only gets sun in the afternoon, which limited my options. Luckily they all fit in my backseat!
I had measured the bed beforehand so I could calculate how many bushes to buy once I picked them out and knew how wide they would actually get. So when I got home, I spaced them out about 3.5 feet from each other to get a good picture of how things would look, and then I used scrap tile as a placeholder to mark where to dig my holes:
Then it was time to plant (yay!). Luckily we got a good amount of rain last week, so the digging was pretty easy. And once I was done, I was glad I had bought the larger bushes, because they still look tiny!! But I like them and they will grow in some over the next few months. Apparently I didn't get a good picture of the whole lawn at this point, but you'll see what I mean a little further down.
The next step was to add mulch. I debated doing landscaping fabric, but I ultimately decided not to because 1) I'm planning to plant flowers in the next few weeks, so I didn't want to have to cut tons of holes in it to do that and 2) I already cleared the bed pretty well and it's open enough I can weed it pretty easily if there is a problem (we'll see...). So I headed off to Lowes.
That's when things started to get out of control. Once I was at Lowes, I realized I should probably also buy some top soil, since I wanted to plant flowers and my bed had a lot of clay I had turned up while planting the bushes. So first, I went for the mulch, and once I pulled out the drawing I had made of the front bed measurements, I realized I would need 15 bags! So I loaded it all up onto one of those big flat push carts they usually have in the lumber area and headed towards the top soil. Only it turns out that 15 bags of mulch is 450 pounds of mulch... so it was a little slow going! I decided it probably wasn't wise to load anything else on to a cart I could barely push, so I went ahead and checked out. One of the Lowes employees helped me load it into the Civic, and I think he was shocked when I took the big cart and headed back in to the store when we were done! I bought 10 bags of top soil (at 40 pounds each) and luckily it all fit in to the trusty Civic (barely!).
So I was officially the crazy lady at Lowes loading 850 pounds of stuff into her little car. And it's a good thing I only live about a mile from Lowes, because that car was riding low! Anyway, here's the spread once I got it home, can you believe this all fit? (that's Sam's Corolla in the background, but the Civic is about the same size...)
Oh and Sam would like me to mention that he totally would have helped at Lowes if I had just waited for him to get home (he was volunteering to help clean up a run down Little League field) but he did help me unload once I got it all home.
Okay, so after the Lowes adventure, I got to work spreading the top soil and then the mulch. In the end I only used 10 bags of mulch, but I'm sure I'll find a good home for the rest of it.
See how nice and rich the top soil looks compared to what I had in the bed already?
And here's the mulching in progress (back part is done):
In the end, I was very pleased with the final product! Does this count as finishing my goal of completing the front yard landscaping? I think I will give myself credit for it... even though I still need to plant flowers or something else to spruce it up. But it feels good to have the main work done!
Oh and as you can kind of see above, I also picked up some hanging baskets at Lowes (because there was nothing in the front seat of the car yet... haha). Here's a close-up:
The total project cost so far has been around $425 ($340 for bushes, $65 for mulch/soil, $20 for hanging baskets) which I figure has definitely saved me some money vs. having a landscaper come in. Although it doesn't look nearly as good as it might have with a landscaper, so I'll be spending some extra cash on some flowers to finish it all out...
I'm hoping my Mom will lend her flower expertise this weekend while she's visiting, so there should be more upgrades to share soon!!
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