Sleep, creep, leap

The front yard has never looked better, and so I thought I'd take a little "after" picture and compare it to the "before" pic, taken after we'd first finished landscaping.  The first pic was taken Spring 2013, and the most recent one was taken today, almost exactly two years later.

It's amazing how fast shrubs grow.  The trees are still on the small side, but now that they have spent a couple of years putting down roots, will probably start growing in height very soon.  How does the saying about tree growth go?  "Year One, trees sleep. Year Two, they creep.  Year Three, they leap."  This next year should be a "Leap Year," I hope so anyway. But no matter what, it is nice to see some greenery and growth when we look out our front windows.

Finished!

This morning Big Ag and I went out to breakfast, then over to the landscape rock place to buy some fill gravel for our front yard project.  They dumped a couple of Bobcat loads into the back of the truck, and off we went towards home with the rear end of the truck hangin' low.

A few bucketfuls later, and we were finally there...at the end of the front yard remodel.  Here's a couple of pics:

We've come a long way from the huge, water-sucking lawn that was in place when we moved in....

Front Yard Progress

Every week we get a little bit farther on our front yard project....to a point where our neighbors now stop and tell us it's starting to look great.  This was a far cry from a couple of months or so ago when people drove by our house and thought the house was bank-owned because it all looked so unloved.  But killing a lawn without using herbicides takes dry weather and plenty of time.

So with that done, now real work can begin on it. Big Ag and Groceries did the hole digging for the plants (not easy in this part of the property, as the soil is quite rocky), and are currently putting in our log border on our pathway.  I did the design work, layed down all the landscape fabric and bark and also put in the drip system.

Probably the most satisfying thing for me has been running that drip system and noticing how much less water it uses than the lawn we inherited did.  When you pay for electricity to run your well pump, anything you can do to have that pump come on less is a good thing.  

So now we've got most of the bark, landscape fabric and plants in.

Bark is about 80 percent done

And we've moved on to making our pathway to the flagpole.  We'll be installing flagstones and gravel next week, finishing up on the bark laying, and then sitting back and enjoying watching it grow.

Starting the pathway border

OK, that was not honest. We will not be sitting back and watching it grow.  We will simply move on to the 9,999 other projects around here that need doing.

Anything else might get boring!