Landscaping on a Dime

For some time, we've been considering changing our front yard landscaping. Having a toddler meant always having my flower garden stomped through. Having company always meant someone opening their door and getting attacked by a great big firebush (which by the way was about 5 times as big as in this picture - we chopped it down to make the area more work friendly). When we noticed how worn out our front porch was starting to look we decided to make a few changes. While we are not upgrading the front porch at this time, we decided to go ahead and prep for the porch by fixing the landscape to work around our plans for the new porch.

In order to do this as frugally as possible we made plans to reuse what was already there and replant.

Before:

This area was next to our driveway. It was very inconvenient when guests would park at the house. So we simply pulled out the huge firebush, pulled the baby firebushes out with roots intact for another area, and pulled all the additional flowers out that we were not planning to replant. We did save the one pink rose bush which wasn't even visible initially.



After:

To finish this area we simply added the rose trellis and planted another rose bush on the second side and held the trellis in place with two large rocks which were already in the garden, but we didn't know it. Then we replanted my dianthus or Sweet Williams which were currently getting stomped on constantly by my son as they were in a high user area. I added the two pots of cats and kittens and which were sitting unnoticed practically under the deck. Each spring I hope to add a few more diantus until the garden is completely full.

This area was where the diantus were planted but was too high traffic and didn't make any sense. We will eventually lay grass seed and let this area become part of our yard. As we were constantly stepping in it and through it to cross to our driveway etc., this made perfect sense.





Before:

This area was a mess. There were too many items, not spaced well and no rhyme or reason. Since we were planning to shorten this area for the new porch we simply left the plant on the left corner - this one gets very large and holds lots of bird nests in the summer, then pulled everything else out. There was a pile of Iris bulbs which we saved and one green bush we saved. The Rhodadendrun we pulled and gave to my mom as it's never done well at our house, but is now very happily living at my mother's.














After:

Then we replanted the baby firebushes which we pulled from the driveway area in the center area, replanted the green bush and then replanted the iris bulbs in front of all the bushes. We also replanted some bulbs which yield the nicest orange flowers in front of the green bush. This area will look fantastic come spring and summer!




Lastly we simply bought mulch - which we got from a wood chipper directly and only paid $25.00 for the truckload versus $85.00 from a nursery and voila! - A newly relandscaped yard for the cost of time, hard work and $25.00 in mulch.