Curb Appeal

In a recent post I was lamenting the fact that we haven’t yet won “Yard of the Week” and I surmised that this is because of the derelict state of our parking space at the top of the yard.  Who wants a parking space in their yard anyway?  Well, I don’t, but we have one and since our garage is one-car only and the driveway is super steep, it is a convenient place to park our second car.  The former owners filled the space with crushed red brick/gravel and outlined it with big rocks.  Last year we enlarged the space so two cars could fit there without squishing the grass.  At that time we removed all the rocks that edged the smaller space.  We planned to edge the new, larger space with bricks to create a nice uniform edge to hold the gravel in place and keep it from rolling into the grass.
We finally got around to accomplishing this last week.  Granted, we still lack 72 bricks to finish the end, but I am impatient and wanted to share!  Of course, this improvement is all because of my Mama!  Although Papa provided the bricks (or perhaps we stole them from his stash!) Mama loaded them and brought them to my house, then unloaded them.  She dug out all the sod from the edge (with mattock and shovel), leveled the ground and put each brick in place.  I helped by measuring the width, weeding, hauling bricks and discarded sod.  Oh and I took pictures… my specialty!


Here’s what it looked like before we got started:

After we reseeded the front yard last fall, the “edge” of the space totally deteriorated so we had to dig out a lot of grass.

But after several hours of digging and hauling we were still not done… haha!  But we only quit because we ran out of bricks.  So, here is the almost completed project:




All we need now (in addition to the remaining bricks) is some more brick gravel to fill in the space.  And maybe pull a few more weeds. ;)  Then it will be all fresh and clean looking!

I also mentioned in my post of yore that I was planning to add salvia to my front flower bed.  I finally found my salvia specimens at Walmart and I got five of them to fill in the space behind the pink verbena.  While I was there I also bought six pink perennial dianthus to go in between the verbena, so hopefully (if voles don’t eat them) they will come back next year and I won’t need annuals for color in this bed.
Voila!






It looks so much nicer now… hopefully some certain committee members notice, too! ;)  Stay tuned!