As I said earlier this week we have had a very wet summer so far. We love the rain, the sound, the fresh smell. But it makes it difficult to make progress on one of our  garden.

The outside of our home had been pretty neglected while waiting to be sold to us. We knew we couldn’t do much about it until spring/summer because of fall leaves or snow.

But in the past few weeks when it has been dry we have started several projects.

Project 1: Curb appeal. 

The front yard beds had been bordered with wood sticks from the property, uneven and rotting. Although we had cleaned out most of the leaves from fall a good layer had escaped us before snow hit. The beds had several perennial plants including hostas, some succlents, and wilting and rotting rodi’s.

My first project was to clean it all up to see what plants we even had. I removed the rotted barrier, cleaned out the layer of leaves, weeded (including roots), and remove the rodi’s so they could be transplanted somewhere with more sun. (We have two very large trees in the front yard making it partial to full shade all day.)

We also have a rock border seperating the road and our front lawn. I clean this out from leaves, weeds, and moved a few needed rocks around. I also removed a rotting cheap address sign from the yard (we have our address on the porch post and mail box so it’s not needed).

While doing this I found a variety of unsafe or unwanted items including broken glass, rusty nails or stakes, plastic pieces of old lawn decorations, old stake lights that no longer worked, and many plastic plant markers for annuals flowers that have long since died out.

Once we saw what plants we had we decided to measure and redefine the planter borders. In doing this we realized their was a stone path that ran right under where we wanted to put our boarder.

The path was buried under a half inch of grass, moss, dirt, and roots. So my next project was to tear the path up, which we discovered was cinder blocks painted yellow, green, and red. We think this path was created before the porch was made thus the odd angle.

We have had too many wet days to make much more progress. But in spite of the lack of sun this week we have started to find new flowers or plants throughout the yard. We have discovered we have peonies both in pink and white in the the front rock bed (which will need to be transplanted to get more sun and bloom). As well as we have flowering wild raspberry bushes all on our hill property.

The hostas will soon also bloom what we believe to be lavender stock flowers.We are hoping for a sunny July so we can transplant, add new perennials to our front yard, and enjoy summer flowers blooming.