Our First Garden

This was the front of our house.  Notice the empty patches of dirt immediately in front of our porch.  Notice the conspicuous lack of color or interest.  We do have daffodils.  But there are not enough to make a statement, and they don't really last that long.  The only things we've added to our front yard are a half-dozen solar-powered lights.  If you look closely, you can see them in this photo...most of them are nowhere near being plumb, as Joe continually hits them with the lawn mower.

In short, our front yard was ugly.


So some time early this summer Joe and I planted or first flower garden.  It was mostly Joe's wish to have a garden.  Not that I don't like gardens, I just hate weeding, and prefer my garden yield vegetables.  Anyway, a friend is a prolific gardener and offered to give us some plants straight from her garden to transplant into our own.  We graciously accepted this offer, as we have a large yard and no money and plants are expensive.  We were given some tall decorative grass (which I LOVE), faux sunflowers, black-eyed susans and wild daisies (both of which I actually quite like), a butterfly bush (which it turns out I don't really like), and some coreopsis (which unfortunately did not flower...we think we put it in a place where it did not receive enough sunlight).

We made a narrow bed on each side of our walkway, and larger beds in front of our porch. 

 We also ditched the hideous mailbox that came with the house and got a much cleaner looking one to mount on the house by the door.

Here's a close-up.

Admittedly, the garden looked a little raggedy when we first planted it.  We did it over the course of two evenings, once in the dark, and once in the rain since the plants could only be out of the ground for so long before they suffered ill consequences.  It turned out way better than we'd hoped, and next year should be even better.  We didn't really have a lot of time to plan out the garden, so we are already planning on moving some things around next year. The tall grasses need to moved further from the house.  I do not care for the butterfly bush.  Joe likes it, however, and we both like butterflies, so we are going to move it to the backyard next year. Also, the coreopsis needs to be moved to a sunnier home.  We loved the black-eyed susans and wild daisies right where they were, so hopefully next year they will be fuller.

I thought I had pictures of the garden in bloom, but I can't seem to locate them.

Our hope for summers to come is to slowly expand the garden forward, until it meets the sidewalk.  We will incorporate small boulders and hopefully more grasses.  We will also have to do some research to see what flowers grow in this zone that are shade tolerant, as there is not as much sun in the front of our house as we originally thought.

All in all we are happy with our little garden.  We will slowly fill the back yard in with plants (hopefully ones that will not make me sneeze come spring) and  eventually have a yard that we are proud to call our own.

The only thing left to do to the front of the house is get it painted or sided, since right now it borders on looking like it should be condemned.

All in due time.