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!

I see [some shutters] and I want [them] painted black!

So… two years and two months ago I had this brilliant idea to paint the front door black.  At the end of the post I told you how I was going to paint the storm door and the shutters to match.  Yeah, well… about that…  I am slow. 

I have finally completed phase two of “paint all the things black”.  My dad came a few weeks ago and took down all the shutters for me.  I don’t do tall ladders. :) 

We powerwashed them and stood them up by the driveway.  Then they sat there for a couple weeks.  And in the meantime my house looked like this:

Finally I got around to washing them again and painting them black!

So while we were taking down the shutters these little pieces of paper kept fluttering down.  They read:  “Due to the ‘color molded-in process’ these shutters cannot be painted” or somesuch nonsense.

Uh, yeah right.  We decided that maybe in 1990 or whenever these were installed, they couldn’t be painted.  But the paint world has evolved and now we have this nifty thing called Krylon Fusion!  So I disregarded the stupid little notices and followed the directions on the paint can for painting vinyl.

I basically sprayed on two coats and let them dry before moving them into the garage to cure for a week. While I was at it, I stuck all the screws in a piece of cardboard and painted the heads.

Then Papa returned and we reinstalled all the shutters.  FYI shutters have a right side up.  We hung the first one upside down because I wasn’t paying attention.  Duh!  When we finished, I stood back to admire the new look.  And I love it!

(No, our grass did not die… we are reseeding the front yard!)

I love it, I love it!  It feels like it was this way all along, probably because the old color was hunter green which is pretty dark, so you might not notice.  Lucky for you, I am telling you! 

Now I just hope this paint will hold up for a while.  If not, I suppose I can always repaint them! :)  And of course I must do something about the storm door.

I almost forgot the best part:  Before and After!!

Mulch Madness

Tis Spring, get thee to the mulching!

A few weeks ago my mom arrived with a truck full of pine needles… and then the next weekend, another load (she has friends with pine trees that let us collect the needles for free each year!) and then the next weekend a load of mulch!  Lucky for me she decided to stay and help me unload all those loads, too! :)  Thanks Mama!

We have been sprucing up for Spring around here, cleaning up the flower beds, raking all the dead leaves away and putting out fresh needles and mulch.  Things are shaping up but we still have a couple more loads in the English garden which hasn’t been properly mulched in two years!  Bad!  So today I’ll just show the progress in the front, before all the Spring perennials start popping up!

In front we have daffodils, creeping phlox and periwinkle blooming…

While I spread pine needles Mama dug up all the mess in the mailbox bed.  We had a trailing vine thing that had taken over and was growing into the yard… so she tore it all out and we put some lilies in where it used to be. It’s so nice now! :)

Ahh, so pretty and neat! Now we just wait for tulips, bleeding heart, azaleas and irises! :)  Yay Spring!

I’ll be back to share the progress in the English garden and backyard as we finish mulching it up in the back! :)

Happy Spring! (hopefully Mother Nature will get the message and it will feel like Spring soon, too!)

Full Sun Mailbox Bed Update

Back in April, I told you about how we enlarged our only full sun bed up by the mailbox.  Well, since then, all kinds of flowers have sprouted alongside the tomato and pepper plants we added.  I wanted to take a minute to share the progress so far!

You may remember the big reveal after we enlarged the bed and rearranged some flowers to fill it in:

Well since then, we’ve added five tomato and two pepper plants, as well as a few more perennials.  And of course, the butterfly bush has re-sprouted since it was unintentionally “trimmed” by a falling tree.  Not to mention the veritable carpet of crabgrass among the plants that I weeded out this morning!  Yikes!  Things are looking much better now:

As promised, we also added a bit more to the left side of the bed to accommodate more veggies!  They seem to like it here, but the bug population is also enjoying the new additions!  Grrr!

And of course, the coneflowers and black-eyed susies are going crazy this summer, too!

While we are out in the yard, let’s have a look around at some of the other summer flowers that are putting on a show!

 

I hope you are having a beautiful summer!

Full Sun

Just two little words found on the label of beautiful plants and flowers, indicating that they need 8 hours of sun per day to thrive.  Two little words that always leave me feeling disappointed.  Because here at the Horvath House, we don’t have much full sun.  We have full sun in fall and winter, sure, but these plants are sun loving summer flowers.  And I want them!  But our only full sun flower bed is this:

Yep, that’s it for sun-drenched flower living space.  Just that sad little disfigured pear-shaped flower bed which I’ve stuffed full of spring bulbs and summer perennials.  We’ve been planning to expand this particular bed for a while now.  This past weekend, we decided the time had come!  We had a truck full of mulch to back up our plans and some brand new full sun plants just aching for a place to live!  So, we got straight to work on Saturday morning.

First, I used spray paint to mark the lines of our new bed.  It took a bit of tweaking to get the shape right, so it didn’t feel too large or too small.  I figured we’d just expand over to the corner at the driveway to make the bed feel grounded and thought out instead of being a shape created to link the mailbox and the butterfly bush.  Exhibit A from 2009:

Once we’d decided on our new boundary, Mama and I started cutting out the layer of sod.  We rearranged the rock border and added a few more rocks to edge the space.  Then we filled it in with fresh mulch.  Next, I rearranged all the plants that were in the original bed and expanded them into the new space.  And lastly, we added our new full sun specimens.  It took us less than three hours from start to finish and then we were on our way to the next project of the day.  Being the impatient gardener that I am, I forgot to take pictures of the process.  So you can just imagine all those parts and we’ll skip to the afters!

That big empty space is the future home of my tomato plants!  Because we all know that tomatoes are full sun lovers!

We added lantana and impatiens from last year’s potted plants.  They are still making their comeback from overwintering in my parent’s sunny garage.  I’ll be sure to update you on the progress.  The new pink flower in the center is a knock-out rose.  I have been wanting one of these for a while now, and I’m so excited to watch it grow!  Hopefully it likes it here in this sunny corner of our yard. 

Here’s your side by side comparison:

There’s more in store for this full sun flower bed.  We ran out of steam for digging up sod this past weekend, but we plan to expand the bed on the left side of the mailbox later this summer.  Then we will have even more room for sun loving plants.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted. :)  For now, I am loving my new flower bed and I can’t wait to fill it in with more of those beautiful flowers I have been longing for!