Landscaping and Flower Gardening
As I mentioned before, there is a lot of landscaping that has been done around the place, but there is still lots to do. This first picture is a natural stone flowerbed built into the front of the house. There were seven different varieties of ferns planted in it.
Since then, we have planted tomato & pepper plants in this bed for a few years. In 2004, I believe we are going to plant soapwort in it. :)
This next one is a picture of a small round stone flowerbed built between the driveway and the road. You can see one of the several patches of Pampas grass that are planted along the road border. There are also several yucca plants.
We weren't sure what to plant in the round bed, but we finally bought a packaged "hummingbird garden" of wildflowers. This whole area where the round flower bed is happens to be sort of an island between our semi-circular driveway and the road. We have been working out plans for landscaping the whole island and turning it into just flower garden, or sort of a park-like area.
This round bed actually ended up as our first strawberry bed. We planted it in strawberries in 2001, then added more plants in 2002. In 2003, it actually produced lots of strawberries. Now, if we could just keep the chickens out of it. :)
This next photo is one of our Rock Garden. It needs some work. We need to clean and paint it. We also will have to fix the pump that used to control the waterfall, as it does not work anymore, and clean the weeds out from the flowers that are planted in there. If that's not feasible, we've also discussed filling the pools with topsoil and planting strawberry beds in them.
The dog at the foot of the rock garden is Teddy, our male Pomeranian. He loves it here! There are beautiful irises planted in and around this lovely rock garden. There are also several empty spots which held bark mulch. We are going to clean those spots out and plant herbs in them. I have bought lavender, dill, sage, peppermint, and spearmint to plant in these areas.
As the flowers bloom and the work proceeds (and we get more pictures taken), we will be adding those too. Then we will have before and after shots.