Landscaping Progress

In the past few weeks, Peter and I have been working hard in our spare time and on the weekends (when it's not raining or 95 degrees out haha) to get our front landscaping in shape.  It sure is a lot of work, but today we accomplished even more by turning over all the dirt in the area I want to put a few plants.  This means tomorrow on the way home, I can stop at Lowe's and get my plants and plant them.  Then whenever Jeff comes down with his mulcher, I'll pull weeds one more time and use the mulch that we get to cover the area.  I'm so glad it's going to be done soon!  No more huge piles of dirt in the front yard haha.  We also have planned to take out quite a few trees from our yard to make room for our nicer trees.  We have two beautiful dogwood trees, one on each side and we're going to cut down the pines around them.  There's just too much going on and we'll mulch up most of the trees for the mulch for our landscaping.  The 2 dogwoods are different but each sooo pretty.  

This one is my favorite.  It's a Kousa Milky Way Dogwood.  So pretty!  It blooms later than most dogwoods.  I don't remember it looking this pretty last year.  I think this year we had a great Spring for flowering trees, etc.  because everything seemed in much better bloom than last year.  This Kousa dogwood really grew since last year too.  We'll have to trim it in the fall to keep it from getting too much bigger.

A close up of the Kouse.  I love how the flowers layer right over the leaves.  It is such a unique look to me. 

This is our other dogwood the blooms earlier in the Spring, closer to the beginning of April.  It's a regular Cornus Florida dogwood that most people picture when you say dogwood.  Ours is white but the CF dogwoods also bloom in pinks and reds.

Here's where Peter got all of the dirt turned over.  I can't wait to get the plants and mulch in!  It took so much from the beginning of Spring this year with digging out these huge rooted plants that were ugly, dying and a big pain in the neck to digging our a weed type ground cover.  It wasn't really a weed but spread out flat like one and had really strong roots.  I am so pleased to be nearing the end of this project.  We still have the other side of the driveway to deal with though.  Our goal is to just make that all grass, but we have to dig out all the junk that's in there now.  It dies in the Fall/Winter so hopefully we can get lots out then and get grass seed planted.  One thing at a time, but I get so anxious to do it all that sometimes when I'm outside, I get scatterbrained with what I'm doing and have to refocus on one area at a time haha.  I'm looking forward to when Jeff comes down with his mulcher because I think Barney will be coming along with my aunt Paula and cutting down trees and the holly bush will make such a huge difference too.