Before and After

This area is now ready for stone. That fencing to the left is ready to be put up too. We never run out of something to do.

Knock Outs

These are the Yellow Knock Out Roses that I ordered. I bordered this bed with Fresia. I wonder how long it will be before they come up. This bed is the first one in our whole yard to be completely finished, complete with mulch. Isn't it beautiful....it's a good thing we are not into instant gratification.

What's Missing

For those of you that have been to the house, can anyone tell me what's missing from this picture?????

No help here

This picture is worth a thousand words.....

Another plant delivery....

Three days in a row we got "plant" deliveries. I called in reinforcements. We planted around 145 plants on the first day and another 100 on day two. We are still waiting on another order to come in. There will be no instant gratification in this garden. You will have to stay tuned to see the progress in this garden.

Making Dirt

We had to put together some soil to fill all of these pots that we have begged, borrowed, and stolen. Since we have an unlimited supply of top soil/sand, we bought a couple of trailer loads of bedding mix and tilled it all together and filled all these pots.

Our Nursery......

So we took all of our new stick with roots and planted them all in pots. We have started a nursery. This is a picture of our first delivery. These are all of our trees. We have olives, almonds, red oaks, poplars, hybrid willows, wheeping willows, and blue spruce trees.

Plant Deliveries

Mike and I have gone over board. We decided that we wanted to grow some unusual (for our area) plants and trees in our yard, so we have been catalog shopping.....plant catalogs! Our deliveries all came in this last week. This is what our plants look like.

Coming Soon......

I couldn't wait any longer for flowers, so I went to the Brookshire FFA Show and bought some flowers from Christy. Don't they look pretty. The blueberries in the whiskey barrels are taking a beating from our dogs. I'm not sure they will survive. Coming Soon, fencing and sprinkler system for the GRASSSSSSS.

More trees

Mike found another cedar tree in the woods this week and we have transplanted it, hopefully it will live. The dawn redwood in the other picture is starting to bud out. Since we don't know what this one will look like, I am really excited to see it with leaves.

We are almost ready for mulch...

These are the beds today when we finished. All I need now are some flowers to put along the front edge. This may take a while.

Drainage

We also put in drains for the runoff from the roof to go out to the lake.

New Plants

After much deliberation, we decided to put hawthornes in front of our holly's. They are low growing and bloom really pretty flowers and the leaves are a different color green than the holly's so we have some contrast. We went and picked them up this morning and got them planted before it started raining today.

New Helpers!!!!

I had fresh help today. Taylor and our new puppies (Jack and Jill) were on hand to help dig holes. They did a great job!

This is where we stand...

Hopefully you can tell how the trees are layed out in the yard. I can't wait for them to get new leaves and for the magnolias to bloom. They already have buds on them.

The trees we planted

There are the oaks, the magnolias, and the one cedar. We found a little cedar tree that came out of the ground when we were clearing a fence line last year about this time. We took it home and planted it in a big pot. It grew like crazy and now it has been replanted in the yard.

Some Help

That is, she was helping, when she wasn't texting.....

My Helpers

I actually have two really good helpers. Morgan helped us all day on Sunday digging holes for all those trees that we bought. We got all but six of them planted before it started raining. Really, we didn't force her to help...

We actually have the plants in the ground

We got all the buford holly's in the ground before it started raining today. I had a really good helper!

We have trees too!

Did I mention that the day after we bought all those shrubs, we went and bought trees. We have put "Little Gem" magnolia trees on the two outside corners of the flower beds in the back of the house. We actually bought 10 live oaks, 3 Magnolias, and 1 Dawn Redwood (we have no idea what this will look like once it actually gets leaves), and the 2 Little Gems.

We have stone around our beds!

So we now have the beds outlined and they are ready to be filled with dirt.

Tons of Rocks

Since we now have plants, we decided we better get started outlining our flowerbeds, so we went and bought rocks. On Monday and Tuesday, we moved more than 12000 lbs of rocks. And on Tuesday night we felt like they had all been stacked on top of us. We couldn't move.

Buford Holly's

We bought buford holly shrubs for the backdrop of our flower beds. Looking back, I'm not real sure why we decided to buy these plants before we had even started building our flower beds.

Day One

So last weekend we watched the movie "Julie and Julia" and on Monday morning we started landscaping our yard. I thought that it would be fun to create a blog to chronicle the plants that we are using for landscaping as well as being an easy way to show all of you the progress that we are making on our yard. Here is a before picture from one of our three snow days this winter.