True to my word!

Here's my (err.. monthly?) post on how our lawn is making out after shelling out 3 big ones ($300 ish) for TruGreen lawn spray service.  Basically they make our lawn healthier and kill out our massive amount of weeds in the process.

Here's what it looks like today:

Pretty good, huh?  Our grass actually looks consistent throughout the entire front yard!  No more super green patch on the left hand side anymore. (and yes, we still haven't mulched that other side of the landscaping, we'll get to it eventually).

There's the view to the right.. pretty well blended in too.

Here's the backyard:

It's still a little patchy, but there's definite improvement going on:

Isn't that amazing? wow wow wow. i don't think I would've realized how much of a difference there was if I didn't take those "before" shots (go back to the April blog posts on the right hand side of this blog entry).  We still have a gross amount of weeds to get rid of (not to mention a city complaint about how we don't chop our weeds down and that they grow taller than 8" inches), but we'll get er' done! or at least TruGreen will!

Spring-ish Flowers

This Spring, we had really strange weather. At first, our days were bright and sunny, and our Fall bulbs started to bloom:

You can't tell from the picture above, but we cut our Hyacinth flower line a little short (probably just due to laziness).  We had some bulbs planted in planter pots around the house, these grew, but they didn't grow nearly as fast as the ones we planted straight in the ground:

There's my Hyacinth line cut short: 

Within a few weeks, the Hyacinths died off and in came our late Spring bulbs (I don't remember what these flowers are actually called, they're really pretty, bright yellow, full blooms):

Then, we had a bout of rainy, stormy weather that killed them and left us with nothing but shriveled up stems and some dying bushes.

So out to home depot we went to go get some potting soil, new perennials that will last us till summer (hopefully) and some black mulch to make things really stand out. (and to kill the weeds of course).

After some digging and sweating, here's where we are today:

We severly underestimated the amount of mulch we needed. We'll probably have to get another 9 bags sometime soon to cover the other side of the landscaping.  We removed one completely dead bush (I thought it would feel like a big gaping hole, but you really can't tell), half of a dead low growing shrub, and cut all the dead flowers completely.  I also took some of the bulbs out of the planter pots and the hubs helped me plant them to continue our line of flowers to the green gutter thing (I'm not sure what it's actually called). I'm not sure why we didn't do this in the first place! I also read in an article AFTER we did all this, that you aren't supposed to completely cut out all the leaves from the dead flowers, just the shriveled flower stem itself. Oops. oh well, at least we'll know what to do next year! ;)