Yesterday was sunny, chilly and windy, but I managed to finish off one section of the patio flower beds. I am slowing working my way around the house. I optimistically thought this project of weeding, pruning and mulching the flower beds would take a week. Now that it's been a week, I am revising my deadline and hoping to get it done by May.
I titled this post: Patio Flower Beds - part 1.
I am not sure how many parts to this story there will be, but I'll be sure to keep you posted as I go along.
This part took a while but the results are pretty dramatic in my opinion. Plus seeing before and after pictures keeps me motivated to keep on working.
Here's what the area looked like before. Weeds, overgrown bushes, ivy climbing up underneath the siding of the house:
And now for the after:
after:
I pulled up all the weeds, thinned the ivy and dug out that other bush. I never liked it anyway and it was crowding out the prettier green bush. I pruned the heck out of the green bush and now it looks so cute. I also transplanted a butterfly bush. We have a large butterfly bush on the other side of the patio and I love it. It attracts so many beautiful butterflies in the summer. Somehow, the butterfly bush spread, and a new bush was growing where I didn't want it to grow. So I moved it to here. It should fill in this spot nicely and be a great focal point. It sits under the breakfast room window so once it gets bigger we can see the bush and watch the butterflies from the breakfast room and kitchen. This part of the patio wasn't always this large. About 4 years ago I moved the retaining wall to expand this space and make it easier to mow. It used to look something like this:
That red line is where the retaining wall used to be. It was so hard to mow in there, especially since we just use a riding mower. Without having to buy any additional blocks, I was able to move the existing blocks to reconfigure the retaining wall. I never got around to planting anything in the enlarged flower bed so it just grew into a weed garden. Until yesterday that is. Now it looks 100 times better.
Here are some more after shots for you:
Oh, and one final thing I did was to sprinkle on some Preen. It is a weed blocker, so hopefully this will prevent new weeds from growing and make this flower bed easy to maintain.
You can read about the rest of my flower beds
HERE,
HERE and
HERE
linking up here:
http://www.houseofhepworths.com
http://organizeyourstuffnow.com/wordpress/
