Yes, we are still alive. I haven't blogged in about 400 years (just over a month). We've been "boring busy" as my friend Elizabeth would say. Day to day life with kids and part time work and all that jazz. And, if I'm being super-honest, I took 3 months off to read the entire Outlander series. 8 books. Something like 6,500 pages. Took up quite a bit of my free time. WORTH IT.
But I finished all that and now it's time to do something productive. Since it's spring, that means growing stuff.
Landscaping is something that was lacking in this house when we bought it 2 years ago. It had some mature (read: scraggly and dated) 1980s shrubs and monkey grass littering basically every flower bed. We did exactly zero landscaping our first year here. I was pregnant and nesting indoors and just not feeling it. Last year we planted just a couple of things in the front beds and at the mailbox, then just stuck with containers on the patio. Thankfully (miraculously) it all lived.
I have a notoriously brown thumb, but last year I discovered the secret to keeping plants alive in the Texas summers.
You ready for it?
Brace yourselves.
The secret is: be a stay at home plant-parent so you can water your plant children 2-3 times a day when it's 100 degrees outside in the brutal Texas summers.
That's exactly the last piece of advice I will give in this post because 1) not everyone can or wants to be a stay at home plant parent and 2) I have no business giving any horticultural advise whatsoever.
BUT in the interest of letting you guys know what we've been up to, I thought I'd share a few photos of our landscaping endeavors.
I whipped up a couple of plans for the areas we want to tackle this spring - the backyard pool area flower bed and the front flowerbed in front of our garage. Interior Design skills don't exactly translate to landscape architecture, unfortunately, but at least I can draw a mean plan. Putting it on paper helps me to see where I need tall things, short things, and how many-ish of those things. Then the lovely folks at the nursery + the Neil Sperry Texas gardening bible help me do the rest.
Here's the overall landscape plan for our house. I did enlarged plans of the two areas we were working on, but those got water droplets on them at the plant store, so I don't have them to share. While this isn't absolutely necessary to do, it did help me prioritize the areas we need to work on now and figure out what our long term landscaping plans are. Also, it made me look really cool at the plant store.
We planted a few things in the back bed by the pool, filled in some pots on the patio, and added some GORGEOUS flowering azaleas, camellias, and loropetalum in the front yard. Here's to hoping everything lives. It took two weekends of back-breaking, shovel-snapping, shrub-removing work, but it's done.
It's all so lush and green! At least for now.
There's still a million things on the landscaping wish list (like a flagstone path in front of that azalea bed instead of, you know, dirt), but in due time.
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