With August winding down it’s time to put our landscaping work into high gear. I sure don’t want a frozen 3 foot high pile of mulch on my lawn come December. With grad school night classes starting up again for me this week and the Flyer’s season starting soon (I try to watch every single game), my time for projects will be limited. There’s still a fair amount of work to be done outside…
Our list of outside projects before winter:
1. Finish both flower beds on the side of the house
2. Repair the erosion and bald spots on the front lawn
3. Replace the mailbox with a black hand-stenciled unit
4. Repair the septic clean out pipes I’ve run over with the tractor
5. Seed and fertilize
So, I took advantage of some comp time and left work early to take care of a bare flower bed. Here’s what it looked like a couple weeks ago.
We had already prepped the area with the intention of completing it while we were working the front, but that didn’t happen. A couple of weeks ago we purchased three Japanese silver grass plants and dropped them into a few spots with the goal of adding some interest to that area and more importantly, to try to hide the gas meter.
Mehhh
Here’s what my beautiful wife picked out…
This lineup consists of three Scotch Heathers, three Russian Sage plants and a Phantom Hydrangea. Everything was on sale at our local nursery. The hydrangea is most definitely nearing the end of it’s flowering for the season and is showing signs of browning, but for $10 off original price, I’ll take it. Now that we have August flowers covered, we’ll have to add some spring perennials next year.
While we were at it, we also wanted to clean up the edges of the flower bed and improve the flow into the back yard. We’ve been told by garden folk that you never want to have a flower bed with straight lines. So, we used the ol’ lay down a garden hose to trace out a serpentine flower bed trick (see second photo above).
By the way, this garden shovel is amazing at clearing the top level of grass off and for edging flower beds. A spade shovel doesn’t quite measure up to this task. Highly recommend it.
Here’s how the bed looks with the plants in the ground…
Yeah, well, looks better in person. Maybe next time I’ll take the photo BEFORE I water everything. I mean, look at that Russian Sage on the right, it looks like I stepped on it! So that’s how you hide utilities with landscape.
I’ll post some photos after I finish mulching it.
Speaking of mulch, here’s a before and after showing how much mulch is left…
I think it means something…
