Front Yard Landscaping Progress: a house log

Okay, you all ready for another what-we have-been-doing-outside post? This particular rundown, as you may have guessed from my title (why yes I can pun in Spanish), is about some hosta business that we pulled off, thanks to a bunch of extra hostas growing randomly in our backyard (this backyard garden bed is a hot mess but we will get to it someday!).

Since they were not doing much for us back there, we dug ’em up – about five in total – and chose to put them to better use. For starters, they certainly could assist our bedraggled mailbox (which became quite weedy this spring).

The mums that were there turned into dead sticks in the winter and, well, do not mind that big rock. We found it elsewhere in the front yard and somehow it ended up there temporarily. Perhaps to distract from the weediness? Sure. That is why. And look at poor Squirrel-y (see him tipped over behind that lone cowlick of a daffodil that is fully done flowering?). This is the “first impression” we are putting out to the neighbors. Ugh.

So we pulled all of the weeds out of the driveway (which was a surprisingly major improvement) and the iron squirrel temporarily took residence in the liriope.

Now, the advice from Katherine The Landscape Gal had been to either make the planting bed around the mailbox larger or simply let it fill in with grass/ground cover. Good advice. We did not truly have the energy to dig up a bigger plant bed at this point though, and we liked how the petunias looked there last year. But next year we’d certainly enjoy to expand this bed so it is larger and more gracefully curved for a little more curb appeal magic.

For the meantime, we got three pots of petunias at Home Depot and, paired with some of the hostas dug up from the backyard, we got to planting.

Here is our little arrangement. It looks a bit spaced out right now, but having learned how well flowers grow in that area we are fairly hopeful that it’ll fill in nicely within a month or two.

Oh yeah, and a little mulch never hurt. Here is where it is achingly obvious that Katherine was totally right- this little garden would look so much better if it was bigger. Someday…

At least it looks better than this ridiculousness….

Since we still had a handful of hostas with no place to call home, we chose to use them in this still-blank spot of our front planting bed that we last detailed here.

Ta-dah!

No, wait. Here is the real ta-dah (again, thanks to the power of mulch). Although, this gives you a good idea of how mulch fades after a few weeks in the sun (and pollen). Haha. So hopefully that dorky mulch-tan-line will not be there for long.

People consistently ask what kind of mulch we use, and we simply grab the darkest brown wood mulch Home Depot sells (it is typically on a special like three bags for $7 or something). But once we establish these beds (hopefully by next spring) we’d enjoy to get a mulch delivery since we hear they can be a lot less than buying by the bag as you go.

Oh and those hostas will get pleasant and giant so they will not look as dinky (they seem to keep growing well into the summer, and can get 20+ inches wide). The area is looking better now that we have extended our new plantings a bit more, but what will truly assist is something that is still in the works. Perhaps this rendering below will give you a hint…

Perhaps that was more than simply a hint. It is in fact already starting to come in, but I have not had a chance to mow and take proper pictures yet. That’ll be a topic for another day! Has anyone else used transplanted bushes or flowers to spruce up their landscape lately? Are you a fan of the hosta? They are one of our go-to shade plants (have not killed one yet!). And they consistently seem to be popping up randomly around our yard (the same was true for our first house) so it gives us a little thrill that we do not have to pay $5- 7 for them at the store since they seem to simply sprout up at whim.

And those dudes are fairly darn hard to kill. True story: we once found one in a pot within a large sealed tupperware bin in our basement growing without any light or water about two months after we put it there while we moved! We thought the pot had nothing in it but dirt when we popped it into the bin along with some other pots, and then in the spring it began to sprout right inside the tupperware. We laughed for about five minutes when we found it. It was a hosta miracle, I tell ya.

Psst- We truly should update this master list of outside tasks (it feels like we are inching along out there, but we in fact have a bunch we can cross off now).