Front Yard Landscaping Continued
My trees are all abloom! This is proving to be the perfect low-maintenance tree I’d hoped for back when we planted all three of them in August. These dainty white flowers are just poking their heads out. I’m so relieved they survived their first Minnesota winter, albeit a mild one. There’s a one year warranty in case they didn’t, but the fact that I didn’t need to use it gives this brown thumb a vote of confidence.
But wait, there’s more. With the $500 free plant grant, we had some extra spending money left after buying our trees, so we went wild and got some flowers and plants too!
Center Garden
We have a driveway “island” garden of sorts that sits right in the middle of our turnaround driveway. It’s a focal point of the yard and we want to showcase it with a water feature, or at least clean it up. Before, it was pretty full. Maybe even a little too full. Of weeds…
Our first order of business was clearing out some of those flowers and weeds to make room for more variety.
We planted three of those tall red cardinal flowers. Great for butterflies and birds.
We researched flowers that would be great for pollinators.
These Great Blue Labelia also attract hummingbirds, as you can see.
Finally we planted wild Bergamot. Also a butterfly magnet.
Framing the Garden
We also wanted to line the edges of the flower garden with something. There was dirt about six inches around the perimeter of the garden bricks. Grass and weeds would always grow there, and I guess we could have moved all the bricks out to the true edge. But then we’d probably run into them with the snow plow in the winter. So we wanted a mossy ground cover plant to wrap all the way around.
We found these Cat’s Foot plants that seemed perfect.
They’re growing flowers and might actually need to be trimmed soon.
Mulching the Garden
Finally, we mulched the whole thing. Thanks for the help, Michael!
We chose a blonde mulch that made everything pop.
That cleaned it up nicely. A friend recently told us instead of buying individual bags of mulch, you can drive a truck to the garden center and request they fill it and charge you per pound. I wish we would have know that!
So we’ve got a few things blooming, but nothing major yet. Excited for these things to pop back up. I’ll post an update when we’ve got our first sign of color in the flower garden. Thanks, Mom for all your hard work out here! Ahh it takes me back to my elementary school days when she basically did my entire (award winning) science fair project about growing seeds. Or when she hijacked my 5th grade leaf collection project – In hindsight, it looked a little suspicious with all the tree names in Latin… Just can’t keep her away from gardening I guess. I expect to see you out here soon. There are some weeds with your name on them.
What are you planting, or waiting for to grow?
