Landscaping Updates

It feels like forever since I've written anything here!  Joe and I just got back from the Robinson family reunion  at Crowley's Ridge State Park in Arkansas, and we're pretty wiped out but we had a ton of fun!  It was really great to see the whole family and I'll be sure to post some pictures of all that very soon.  For now, I'll fill you all in on what we did two weekends ago.  I can't believe it's been that long since the last post, yikes!  Anyway, two weekends ago, Joe and I spent almost our entire Saturday reworking the flower bed in front of our house.  

We've been planning to do some work on this bed for a while now but we weren't quite sure what.  We did some "research" by creeping through a few of the really nice neighborhoods in our area.  One thing we noticed pretty consistently was one large evergreen tree in a flower bed at the corner of the house.  We liked this idea, so on our next trip to Home Depot we checked out their tree selection and found a tree called an Arborvitae.  It was tall, but skinny so it would work perfectly in our current flower bed without covering too much of the window that it would be next to.  We came home with an Arborvitae that was about 7' tall and started planning how we would work it into the existing plants in the flower bed.  

The original flower bed layout.  You can't even see the tall grass at the back!

We ended up moving 2 of the grasses to either side of the sidewalk.  

You can see in the picture what we had to work with.  A bunch of day lilies, 3 knock-out roses and 4 Japanese Silver Grasses.  The original plan was to move the day lilies to follow the border of the flower bed, then move the rose and grass plant on the far left to other locations.  By the time it was all said and done, we'd dug up most of the day lilies, every rose plant and every grass plant and moved them, even if only by a few inches.  We just figured that if we were already digging up a few things, we might as well make everything exactly the way we want it.  Of course this day wasn't complete without a couple trips to the Olathe compost and mulch center to fill up my car with some free dirt.  Unfortunately that also led to me needing to wash my car that day, inside and out.  

  

Now we just have to wait for everything to grow!

Hopefully the grasses will grow nice and tall here since they'll have more sun.  

In the end we were really happy with the result and now we have a nice updated look for the front of our home.  Well, that and a killer sunburn.  But I'm just about done recovering from that :)  The transplanted grasses and lilies seem to have adjusted pretty well to their new homes, but the roses are still a little wilted.  Hopefully they make a full recovery soon!  We still have plans to re-work the flower bed in the back yard, but that will have to wait for another weekend.  For now, here are a few more pictures of our landscaping work.  I hope you all have a great week!  

I thought this would help show how tall the tree is :)