A little yard work

Okay, so that title was a bit of a lie.  Here it is Thursday, and I just recovered from a weekend of yard work.

New England had a (short) break from the rain on Saturday and Sunday, so we took advantage by ripping up part of our back yard and finally adding some bushes.  When we bought our house, we had basically zero landscaping, save for a few really ugly bushes.  And, since we purchased the house in late July, I have been concentrating on updating the inside of the house.  This was our first foray into tackling the outside.

The Hubby and I bought all our plants on Saturday, so we could get to work early Sunday morning.  We picked a variety of shrubs, bushes and ground cover - to create a variety in height and color.

So we began by mapping out our landscape area, and starting to dig out the existing grass. [I call it "grass", and it somewhat resembled grass, but frankly - it was a pretty weak excuse for grass].

Then we mapped out where we wanted all our bushes.  Dug lots of holes (you will notice a large pile of dirt in the wheel barrow), then went about planting everything.

After a good watering (although this was slightly unnecessary, given the typhoon we've had the past few days), we raked out the existing dirt and created a slight grade in the soil, to direct water away from the house.  I've mentioned we've had a bit of a basement water problem in the past, so any easy action we can take outside will be a help.

After four bags of mulch (also graded away from the house), we ended up with a very nice little set-up on our side yard.  Plus, the mulch will also help soak up a lot of rain water that would otherwise flood our yard and basement.

I don't particularly love these gutter extenders, but they are necessary, so what are you going to do?  For this project, we picked everything up at Home Depot, rather than going to a specialty garden center.  We didn't want to spend a ton of loot (this is only our side yard, after all), and we knew that Home Depot would limit our choices to things that are well-suited for our climate and were relatively low maintenance.  Once we get around to undertaking our front yard, we will spend more time truly thinking about the look and appropriateness of our plant selection.

But for now - this was a vast improvement on the previous landscaping, which was basically, nothing.