Sometimes It's Too Easy Being Green...

This week I completed a short, but sweet project for our front yard. 

When we moved in almost 5 years ago, our entire yard was shaded! We've since removed an overgrown fruit tree in the front, and 3 LARGE pines in the backyard, but our front yard is still primarily shade. This leaves me with not a whole lot of options for perennials that flower with color, although I think I'm figuring out this whole landscaping process now! ...at least for our yard...

 

Three years ago, I fell in love with these black urns from Target, and drove all over to buy three for our front porches. They looked very stately with our black shutters. 

After years of sitting outside in the frigid temperatures though, the paint starting peeling, and so did it's classiness! I knew I wanted to add in some color, other than green, black and white, to our front yard, and this was the perfect spot to incorporate an accent. 

 Instead of buying a new quart, I just mixed up some paint I already had - a little blue from the boys' bathroom (before I painted over it), and some exterior white. I'm not sure what durability this will give the paint, but I wasn't really going for that.

 I couple of coats later, and I think they look great! I really like the red and blue combo. I even got a compliment from the neighbor across the street, and now he wants me to pick a new paint color for his front door, ha! 

 

 A couple of days later I went to the greenhouse and bought and planted my annuals, like I swore I wouldn't do until June!  Sure enough, that night and the next, we had frost...I called my sister, and she gave me the "I told you so" lecture, like any good big sister! ;) But, a tarp and a trash bag kept them warm just fine. 

I planted Torenia, a shade loving "spiller" that flowers purple and yellow, a few bright pink Impatients as my "filler", and some pink and green Coleus as my "thriller".

 I'll update in a few weeks when they're lush and tall!

 I also painted a couple of glazed pots on our other front porch, ya know, the door no one uses but door-to-door sales people! I still have to dress it up a bit, though.

I'm thinking this stone bird bath is next. It came with the house, so I'm not attached to it, and it gets a little lost. We'll see!

It's About Thyme!

 The weather around here was beautiful this weekend! 

On Saturday, we ventured to my family's cottage for the day to see the Kite Festival on the beach.  Someone was trying to fly a HUGE octopus kite, but it just wasn't windy enough. 

After attempting naps, both boys decided not to, we could see a lot more kites up while we were sitting on the deck. Jeff took Matt (our older son) back down to the beach where they saw two octopus kites, a giant penguin, and numerous other colorful kites!  

On Sunday we finally tackled a project I started a week ago - the pathway to the boys' swing set.

 

Actually, to back up, on Saturday morning before we left, the big boys went to a stone retailer a few minutes from our house to get some pavers for the path. I had done a drive by the week before and found what I thought would work, but I needed a little assistance with transporting them.

 While they were there Jeff sent me a couple of pictures of different options, and we ended up going with a different stone he had found. Same concept, just a little more character... I must have missed it.

This Idaho Quartz Stone is beautiful up close and in person! While it's primarily gray in color, some pieces are rust colored and there are patches of sparkles - not sure how else to describe it. When the sun hits it, it shines! It was really hard to capture in a photo.

Last week I started by moving all of the wood chips and landscaping fabric we had put down last spring. It wasn't until last year that we put the swing set in, so this area had previously been landscaped with no access into my mom's pasture behind our house. 

We used some high tech tools a couple of weed remover tools and old boat ropes we had to line the edges of the path up straight from the fence. We almost skipped this part, but I'm glad we didn't! When we were looking at this area from the house, the makeshift path we had before was never square. Without this step, we would have had a pretty, but crooked path... not acceptable!

Next, we spread almost a dozen bags of top soil and leveled the area to prep it for the stones. Now, we're not landscaping experts by ANY means! It's taken me almost 5 years to learn what plants grow well in our shady front yard (we'll get to that later). So maybe we used the wrong base, however, I knew I wanted to plant Creeping Thyme between the stones to soften the blow when a kid falls... because that's inevitable, right? It already happened when I was taking the after shots. No worries! Matt got right back up saying, "I'm okay, I'm okay!"

After we made sure it was nice and smooth, we started placing the stones. Jeff found a big one, perfect for the beginning of the path ,that we placed at the bottom. I used the Creeping Thyme as a guide for how far apart we needed to have each stone. We continued to work our way up to the top, in rows of two or three stones wide, until we made it to the swing set. 

 There she is, in all her glory! Not the swing set, the path! I bought two flats of Creeping Thyme, and that wasn't enough. I still have to go back and get one or two more, and maybe fill in other areas with some wood chips. It probably seems crazy to have a black dirt path to a swing set... and two boys! I'm hoping by next year this Thyme will fill in more, so that when they're both running around, they won't come in looking like the work in a coal mine. ;)

 My big helper wanted to join me while I took after photos. For the past year he hasn't wanted to make eye contact with the camera... I'll take what I can get, because he's too cute not to take some sort of picture! He's pointing at the one and only Ty plant on the path. Yup, that's the technical name. No, not really. My mom took our little guy, Ty, to the store with her while we were working. When they came back, they had this plant, and she said, "He wouldn't let me put it back! He loved to pat it!" The word "no" or anything of the likes, is no longer in your vocabulary once you've reached Grandparent status, apparently.

Either way, it found a home right in the middle of the path. Here's a close-up. It looks like a succulent of some sort to me. If you have any clue, feel free to chime in!

One final look at our new path *almost* complete! I have plans for the sides of the path, too. And for the rest of the backyard landscaping, when I get the time!

Thanks for taking a look! 

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