We’ve so busy trying to get the inside of our house done that the outside of our house looks pretty sad. We’ve also been using this excuse for a good two years and thought we should try to make an effort this year.
Our front garden is mostly weeds. There are a few legitimate flowers in there somewhere, but they’re hard to find.
Our neighbour’s lawn, on the other hand, is very different and really puts ours to shame.
This year, we wanted to make them proud and step up our garden game. Perhaps we could move from black thumbs to grey thumbs…
Inspiration
As usual, I went looking for inspiration from our neighbourhood. A lot of people have the same patch of garden at the front, so we tried to see how other people made the space look nice. We’re not very advanced, so we needed something fairly easy to implement and care for.
A lot of people use mulch and it seems to keep the weeds to a minimum. So we decided to do the same.
We went to Home Depot and Canadian Tire and bought a bunch of mulch and some top soil, as well as some new plants.
We also bought this mesh stuff that is supposed to help with weeds.
Then we went to work. We had quite a bit of work ahead of us. Taking out all the weeds took us a couple of days, but mostly because it rained…
And also because we ran a 10k…
We also had to remove some pretty stubborn plants, which we removed using the sawzall.
When the weeds were all gone, we were left with a pretty big patch of dirt.
Laying down the mesh was a bit annoying (mostly because we had to make cut-outs for the existing plants).
We first placed our new plants on the soil to see where they looked best. I learned this technique from watching other people plant their gardens. It’s a pretty good method.
Once we were happy with each plant’s placement, we started planting.
Finally, we spread the mulch around the plants. We used 8 bags for our little space.
We were pretty proud of our work.
We don’t have green thumbs yet, but I think we’re somewhere in between black and green thumbs.
Here’s a before and after to show our progress!
