Saturday, In The Yard

We got a little more work done today. This time we attacked the flower bed that runs along the outside of the fence and faces a fairly busy street. This is bad because when we moved in, it looked like this:

After a little work last fall we had it looking like this:

After today's work it looks like this!

Today we started by weeding the little buggers that had taken over this spring. After that we laid down some Miracle-Gro Weed Preventer & Plant Feed. Next we planted four Zebra Grass plants. 

We wanted something low maintenance that does well in the sun and won't catch a ton of debris/leaves. Because this side of the house faces a street with decent traffic we get a lot of wind and with that a lot leaves and even sometimes a little litter. Since we don't find empty Fritos bags or McDonald's cups too appealing we went with more grass like plants in hopes that less trash will get caught in our yard. In theory this makes sense to us but hopefully we haven't lost ya yet. We're gonna have to find a way to get the three existing droopy grasses to perk up a little, but we'll worry about that later.

We also dug up the rose bush that was on the corner of the fence and replaced it with a less thornier light green shrub which of course we can't remember the name of. Anyways we really like the bush and think that once we get around to staining the fence a little darker, all these green plants will "pop" even more. Speaking of "pop" we finished the day by laying down some black mulch to give the bed some pizzaz.

So let's go back to last fall when we moved in for the before...

And now for the after...

Now it's onto the other 128,974 areas of the yard that need help! Anyone out there conquering some landscaping challenges this spring/summer?