My Summer Gardening Plans!

Every year I try to do more landscaping in my yard. I really enjoy the manual labor and I love to make my yard beautiful. I wish I could do more each year but sadly the budget only allows a little bit. This year I am enlarging some flower beds, completely changing my garden to accomidate a teepee for the kids, and creating a path to "enter" the yard while surrounding the patio with flower beds. 

I have already started on the path. I was initially only going to put a narrow stepping stone kind of path in but then I realized we needed to be able to get the lawn mower into the yard without crushing the flower beds. So, a big wide path it has become!

Mini path progress (it will be solid stone when I'm done). This is just a dry lay to see if I like it. Now I need to go get some sand. Except for the sand (which is only $1.50 a bag) this is a free project....the last people who lived here put in the patio and kept all the extra stones in a big pile behind the garage. It is kind of nice to get rid of the piles! I don't want the pavers perfect squares like they are now though so I need to figure out how to break them.

View of the path from the yard looking at the house. I will rip out all the grass to the right of the path and make that flower bed butt up to the path.

I got a couple of plants today. One is a vivid pink hollyhock....I will plant it near my bean teepee. The other is a dappled flamingo willow. I still have to figure out where I want to put it. I researched it online and it is supposed to get HUGE and grow fast. I may put it in the bottom right of the below picture.

If you look closely you can see my pink circle in the grass. I started making the flower beds around it it two years ago. I will clean it up and make the flowerbeds go all the way around (except for an "entrance") this summer. Next summer I plan on digging out the center and putting in a patio for our bistro set.....can't afford all the stones this year though. If I do put the dappled willow near this "almost" patio it will be in a perfect position to block the patio from the neighbor's prying eyes.

Finally, the "fun" project! Over in this corner of my yard I had my "garden" it was tiny, but you can see another pink circle. This one is where I need to rip the grass out right now. I'm putting in a very small brick patio which will be the floor of my bean teepee. Then I will create new garden beds around the outside of the teepee area. I still need to mark those before I rent the sod cutter.

Off to start digging!