farmhouse landscaping

i love plants. i’m a perennial plant hoarder to the extreme. my last house… i went crazy. i just bought plants left and right at random greenhouses, farmers markets and road side stands not really even paying attention to if they were the right fit for my sun allowance, soil type etc. i ended up with a mess, pulling them out and planting some simple bushes before we listed the house for sale. my one regret was not digging up the iris’s that i had grown the five years we lived there. they were so dark purple they were almost black. ah!

we decided with this house we were going to do it right. we were going to take our time and do it one project at a time. this spring we decided we needed to do the front first. it was starting to look like a weed jungle and the beds were not cut right, there was not proper drainage and … it was a mess. knowing the mistakes of our past i decided this was not a job to tackle ourselves. i enlisted the help of my pal jess who is a plant genius (she calls herself a plant nerd) and had her design the beds and figure out the plant varieties we should be planting.

i’m a huge fan of growing cut flowers so i wanted it to be eventually full and farm/cottage/gardenish. i hate that plants start out as babies. she recut the bed lines and placed a few trees. we were even able to save on some money because she split our hydrangeas up and replanted them in other places. she also found a few treasures growing in the backyard landscaping that we hope to rip up next year. plants (and trees) can get expensive! this was definitely a good way to save on money.

we moved a bunch of rocks from an old pule and used them to line the deck and help with drainage. the part of the house by the garage was just rocks with shrubs creeping out so we ended up moving the stones along the side. go figure we do all this the summer it rains like twice. we accidentally rode over the underground sprinkling with the tractor but now have to get our well fixed before we fix that. (house stuff never ends)

this part of the house used to have vines growing up the side but fell off during a winter storm. we replaced it with this little tree that needs to grow a lot faster because it looks a little bare at the moment! what do you think? if i had the chance to do it over again… i don’t think i would change a single thing. having someone who knows their plants was a huge help and in the end, saved us a lot of unnecessary cost. next up… backyard (next year)