Darrell and I broke down the task into three parts:
1) Landscape Plants and Beds
2) Lawn
3) Irrigation System
Upon receipt of expert advice from one of my coworkers (he's a landscape architect, so I deem him an expert!), we decided to focus our efforts this weekend on the Landscape Plants and Beds. My coworker was kind enough to draw us a landscape plan for our front yard, complete with various options for each of the plants within the overall scheme.
Friday morning, Darrell and I made our way to the amazing Lukas Nursery in Oviedo to select our plants. Donnie at Lukas drove us around on his golf cart that was rigged up with a trailer for our plants. He offered us helpful information about all of our selections, and also offered us alternative plants that he thought would give us better results. Donnie also threw in some free potting soil and gave us a recommendation for fertilizer. He made it painless for us newbie landscapers. He was knowledgeable, provided amazing customer service, and was a real character!! They turned the Moody family into customers for life.
We opted to have our plants, potting soil, and mulch delivered to our house the next morning (Saturday) for the very affordable $50 fee. (Worth every penny, even for us penny-pinchers!) Here is a picture of our deliveries:
What are all of those plants, you ask? Here's the run-down:
5 Boxwoods (under the bay window)
4 Camellias (3 in front of the brick wall and 1 by the front porch)
6 African Irises (in front of the walkway)
2 Italian Cypress (anchoring each end of the brick wall)
3 Firebush shrubs (in the peninsula)
14 Blue Rug Junipers (framing the rest of the landscaping)
and...
1 Tabebuia tree (Lavender Trumpet, at the end of the peninsula)
We also used 7 bags of potting soil and 28 bags of pine bark mulch.
Step 1: Clear Out the Beds (Saturday)
Removal of weird grassy plants:
Raking all beds and clearing the sugar sand dirt of all organic stuff:
Here's the pile of organic matter removed from the bed areas:
Cleared beds:
Cleared peninsula area:
We caused so much upheaval in our front yard's ecosystem, Mr. Snail was trying to escape by climbing up the wall of the house!
Step 2: Lay Out Plants (Saturday)
Next, we placed all of the plants in their planned locations and made adjustments as necessary:
Step 3: Planting (Saturday)
We planted the African Irises first:
And then it was all in!
Step 4: Landscape Edging & Mulch (Sunday)
This took us all day on Sunday. Most of it was installing the edging. We ended up going with the cheaper plastic edging, with plans to upgrade someday to stone. For now it'll delineate our beds and make maintenance a lot easier. Plus, we now have definition of where sod will go and can better calculate how much sod to order.
Halfway through mulching our newly edged beds!
Completed landscape beds!
Completed peninsula!
Look at our new tree!
Darrell's hard-earned and horribly painful blisters:
Admiring our beautiful home and hard work:
A Lovely Moody House:
First, let me say that I now know why people hire people to landscape their yards. It's hard work. Back-breaking, intense, sweaty, annoying, frustrating labor. One major lesson -- you can never have too much mulch. We learned this by taking three trips to the nursery to restock. Thank goodness for the two bonus bags of free mulch they threw in on our third trip -- obviously they could smell a newbie and mercifully helped me avoid a fourth visit!
In the end, we're in love with the results, though. It looks fantastic, and our home is starting to shape up! We even had three different neighbors come over on Sunday to compliment our hard work on the house, which felt like a big high-five from The Pines.
Next up: Irrigation
And, Later: Sod
Stay tuned!
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