Quarry Orchard

Yesterday, we spent the day landscaping. 

Well, kinda... we newspapered and mulched all day and planted a few things too. 

 

We started this garden in our back yard last year. After we lost Lane, we received a beautiful rose from my school and decided to start a  back yard flower garden/patio for it. It was bloomed out perfectly yesterday for his birthday.

All of these day lilies were planted last year. We got them ALL FREE from a good friend of mine who was also my mentor when I student taught. He and his wife have a local day lily farm. We didn't want to spend the money at that time to complete a backyard patio, so we just planned it. That's why we have a big L of flowers in the yard :)

We also didn't want to lay plastic and mulch over it. Day lilies grow and spread and we wanted to give them room and make splitting them easier on us. So, we laid newspaper down and then mulched over it. We have pea gravel in the front, but for the projects we did today, we didn't want anything permanent; so we went with bark mulch. The newspaper and mulch will eventually break down and add to the soil also.

The mulch was less than $25 per scoop. 1 scoop = almost a truck full = a lot of punch for not much $.

Our backyard has always been so blah, so we're trying to make it a nice area where we can hang out. We do plan to put pavers down in the L and create some walkways. I found some old bricks on craiglist, but we still aren't ready to fork over the cash to complete it. We are doing things a bit backwards, but we had the flowers and needed a plan. Lane's rose is in the pic above... it has the big board by it. (the blooms were too much for it this year and it's leaning... the board is the temporary crutch for that. We didn't want it to break).

We akso started a petting zoo in the back while we worked. 

They got to hang out in the chicken coop/run. It wasn't what they had in mind, but they were troopers. 

We also mulched around the grapes so Dustin could stop chopping them up knicking them with the weedeater.

Before mulch

After (we're still on the same truckload of mulch too!)

 Our bluberries are about to explode too. We recently bought 2 more plants. They were in the 1/2 dead so they're 1/2 price section at Lowe's. They just needed a bit of TLC. They look GREAT.