making progress on the landscaping

I still have "a ways" to go, but at least I am making progress on relandscaping. The focus for this summer has been the area on the street side of my front wall.

As most of you know, I had a curved sidewalk poured from the driveway to my front walkway last year. The only landscaping in front of that section of wall had been about a 1ft (maybe a little more) bed in front of the wall with (what is supposed to be) decorative grass on both ends and some sort of bulb plants (bloom yellow - but not daffodils) in between. The "clumps" of grass were definitely NOT decorative to my way of thinking ... and the other plants were okay, but not really healthy (not very pretty).

I then "share" a wall with my neighbor to the north. In front of her side of it, she had a nice "curved" bed with several nice plants. In front of my side was the same straight area with another of those grass "clumps" by my walkway and more of the yellow flowers.

So, I started with that section & "curved" the bed on my side out to my sidewalk to be symmetrical with hers. I removed the grass clump and most of the yellow flowers as well as all the extra sod from the new portion. I thought the sod would be hard part. I dug it up carefully, so that I could transplant it to other areas of the yard that had bare spots. Well, I found the reasons for those bare spots! Underneath them was either rock, clay or roots! So, relaying the sod was more difficult than digging it out. :(

Once I had gotten the sod laid, I returned to the bed. Digging out the huge ornamental grass plant turned out to be the REAL work. Since this (original) bed had large river rock instead of mulch, I had to move it out of the way to dig around the plant. Of course, you always place some sort of cloth underneath rock to keep it from sinking into the dirt. Whatever they used was VERY good. I could not break through it to dig the plant out! I had to pull it up from that entire section so I could dig the roots out from under it. But, since the original hole cut for this plant had become too small, the roots had actually enmeshed into the cloth! The only way to free it was to cut it out. That whole process took longer than digging the sod out!

I then also dug out most of the yellow plants so that I could put a dwark crepemyrtle near the wall (again, adding symmetry to the other side where she had one as well). I later planted a carpet rose bush in the front "curved" portion of that bed.

What is left to do in that bed is get more river rock and get it put down in the new area. It's waiting for completion of the other side to do that all at once for both beds.

That was "Day 1" of the project - which was July 25.

I'll continue the saga in another post ... it's still "in work" but I am making progress!