Front Yard Fresh Up

Glenn is a little obsessed with the lawn.  Religiously he weeds, seeds, and fertilizes on a prescribed schedule that our local hardware store recommended to him.  But the bushes tend to get neglected since I've never paid much attention to them and Glenn's more focused on getting our lawn to look like a green carpet.

Our house came pre-landscaped and like many lessons learned, we should have paid more attention to the spacing and placement of the newly planted landscape but of course we didn't.  They've had seven years to fully take root and spread and one plant looks like a creature coming out from the black lagoon with arms and legs.



Glenn planned a full day of trimming the bushes, mulching, and seeding the lawn - the key word here is planned.  He got about half way done with trimming with the electric hedge trimmer and then cut himself pretty darn deep.  Luckily his digits were still attached but he was forced to take a break from yard work and go to the emergency room. 

However, being as obsessed about the yard that he is, Glenn didn't let a near dismemberment stop him.  He finished up the trimming and mulching when he got back from the ER.

Here's his finished product. 



The front yard looks so much better!  And more importantly - the Scary Swamp Thing doesn't look so scary anymore - sounds like a line from a kids story!

Friends:  Any thoughts, or ideas?  Please don't by shy and feel free to leave comments!

Container Gardening

I'm a horrible procrastinator.  We bought two of these large planters last year but never got around to actually putting anything into them.  This year we made some progress and actually filled the planters with gravel and top soil.  They've been sitting in this state for the past two weeks.



Rather than wait another year to actually put plants in the planters, blogging about our home improvement projects has really motivated us to finish these half completed projects.  Combined with a great sale on petunias at Lowe's ($0.50 for a six pack), we had the motivation to finish this simple project :-)

The only drawback was that the plants didn't have many flowers blooming but were otherwise healthy and at $0.50 a pack, we weren't going to be too picky.  On our way out we also saw the sign that Lowe's guarantees their plants for a year and since they're annuals, that's pretty much a lifetime warranty!

After an afternoon of playing with the dirt and flowers (with a short interruption when we thought Glenn cut his finger off with the hedge trimmer), we had these two pretty planters to adorn our front door.  Hopefully with some sunshine and a little water we'll see more magenta in the coming weeks.  If not, we're digging them back up and returning them to Lowe's ;-)