diy reveal: front yard

Now that the weather is actually summery, I can finally show off our yard! We assumed it’d be a relatively small project, but we worked for 6 days straight to get it done.

When we moved in, we had absolutely no landscaping of any kind whatsoever. Obviously, that wasn’t ideal, but we had so many other projects going on in the Fall, that we had to wait for Spring to plant.

To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. I’m not familiar with dry climate plants, and my ideal yard would have been almost entirely hostas (I’m from the South, remember?). Those definitely wouldn’t work with our area, and sun levels. I was only left with the desire to have hoasta-shaped plants, for a similar feel (think Southern Living garden, but in the dessert).

I had read that you should plant before it get hots (and who knew we’d been cool for so long this year?), so I headed to my favourite nursery at the end of March. Since I had no clue where to start with my yard, I asked for one of the staff’s help in identifying what kinds of plants might work well. From there, I chose a couple of favourites, including a small tree, which was key to my vision.

For some reason, even though our front yard isn’t big, I kept assuming is was like 1/4 the size that it is. Plant purchasing round 1 was definitely nowhere close to realizing my lush dessert garden dream. Round two led me to a different nursery, where I, again, got help from someone who actually knows something about plants. I came away with some really great larger selections, and a few smaller ones, since I grossly underestimated how much I’d need the first time.

Now that I had enough to work with, I began arranging things—I still had no idea how I was going to lay things out! It took quite a bit of thought, as I also had to keep in mind the plants sizes once they grew.

Oh, did I mention everything was d o r m e n t?! Not only did I not know about dessert plants, but I was buying based on the size, and the tiny pictures that tell you how to care for them.

With all my plants planned out in a satisfactory way, I realized I still had a couple of holes, and headed back to the first nursery to get 3 or 4 more things. Then, it was digging time.

As I mentioned at the beginning, it turns out our yard had never been landscaped in its entire 20 years. How do we know? Because we pulled out at least 100 pounds worth of rocks. From those tiny bed. Yup. The going was slow, because you could hardly dig anywhere without finding a 5-10 pound rock, though Todd also pulled out a couple of massive ones, as well.

Once the plants were in, it was my job (at 14 weeks pregnant) to dig the border—I only wanted the small edge to show, so I had to dig 6 inches down to put them in). It was tedious, but worth it. Finally, we were able to mulch, and we were done!

However, since it was March, and everything was dormant, I wanted to wait to show it off, as it wasn’t that impressive-looking. Our dwarf crab apple bloomed beautifully in April, and we watched as the plants each started coming to life. Except three, which never grew at all. I recently went back and replaced them so that everything in our yard would be living.

I love how it turned out! And, I can’t believe how well it turned out! Plus, every though is drought tolerant, which was important to me, because of location, but also care.

Our yard features: Russian sage, three kinds of artemisia, a Burgundy Bunny grass, lavender, a butterfly bush, hummingbird mint, lilac, and a crabapple tree.