Before Photos
With spring moving in, I've begun work on our horrid front-yard landscaping. With the tortoise garden in the backyard, we have spent much more time landscaping that area (we've only lived in the house for 3 years this August). @Prairie Mom suggested I post before and after photos of what will hopefully become our butterfly garden sometime later this season. My fiancé and I are huge fans and advocates of native gardening, which supports the natural ecosystem of a particular area. Even adapting native gardening in a small area, such as your yard, can really have a positive effect on the environment! I have adapted some native plants (that are safe for my Russian to eat) into my tortoise garden and you can see those in my photo albums or here: http://www.tortoiseforum.org/thread...-russian-tortoise-enclosure-and-garden.92343/
The ultimate plan for the front yard is to get rid of all the pesky lava rocks and "Windsor stones" and to replace that with new, fresher topsoil and wood chips. I think the wood chips in the backyard are a nice pine bark and we'll probably purchase the same again to match. By late summer, our butterfly garden will (hopefully) be full of milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), maybe Joe-pye weed (Eutrochium spp.), spiked blazing star (Liatris spicata), bergamot (Monarda spp.), and other plants that butterflies and hummingbirds love. Most of these plants should be native to Michigan or the Midwest area of North America, woo hoo! I've heard that if you want monarchs, plant Asclepias incarnata; and if you want swallowtails, plant dill (Anethum graveolens), so I may also get some dill. The milkweed is not only food for the monarchs, but it is also the plant where they lay their eggs. They cannot survive without milkweed! If this kind of gardening interests you, check out MonarchWatch.org. This is a huge project, so don't expect to hear back from me for quite a while!! XD
My fiancé is out studying for an exam, so I'll be getting a workout all by myself! Here's the very front flowerbed, just outside the front door. What you can see is a lot of dry, nutrition-less dirt where most of the lava rocks have been removed. I'm still racking some up from this area. They go down almost a foot deep! Under that layer is some plastic tarp, which will also be removed. Almost directly under that is clay. When the housing developments came through the area in about the 1950s or so, they removed all but a tiny bit of topsoil, leaving our darn yards with more clay than we need. We have a couple random plants down already, and they will need much more topsoil in the future. My fiancé wanted a heather plant; we put down a Chinese lantern plant that happened to really thrive; there is some milkweed; and a cardinal plant that may or may not live... These plants are mostly still dormant from the winter.
Just last night we finished pulling out that giant root ball from the hole you can see! My fiancé did a "caber toss" kind of thing with it yesterday and got 6'! It's pretty heavy. It was a large bush, severely overgrown, that the previous homeowner did not prune at all! The top branches were just about growing into the gutter at the roof when I chopped all the branches off last season. Plus its absence allows more sunshine into our front room window there, where most of our plants are growing (including my precious lime tree). I have 2 or 3 more stumps of these to remove this spring.
Here's a weeping cherry tree, which I'm thinking was planted with the original landscaping. Our neighbor across the street had one too and removed it because it doesn't seem to do very well. We've removed a lot of dead branches from it in previous seasons. Maybe it just likes to be pruned a lot. I'd personally like it entirely removed eventually and replaced with a native ornamental tree (assuming there is one). Serviceberries are nice. The weeping cherry drops a lot of sticks and makes quite the mess. On the right is my yucca, which hasn't grown much since I planted it last year (but maybe its roots are just growing first). I really like their flowers, so it's kind of a random plant for the butterfly garden. We like a lot of plants...
Here's the back of the front yard on the side of the house; you can see my finch feeder in the distance. Rabbits live under our back deck and often run under the fence, moving around a lot of the lava rocks. I'll be raking them and bagging them up to leave out in the garbage each week, a little bit at a time. There is NOTHING else you can do to get rid of these darn rocks! They're incredibly frustrating to get rid of, so I advise you to seriously consider whether you want these in your garden before purchasing them! The lava rocks really take up a TON of space, which means we'll more than likely need a giant pile of topsoil dumped off at our house to refill our flower beds!
It's only 44°F out today, so I'd better keep moving to stay warm. The sun has moved up in the sky a little so now it's back to work!
With spring moving in, I've begun work on our horrid front-yard landscaping. With the tortoise garden in the backyard, we have spent much more time landscaping that area (we've only lived in the house for 3 years this August). @Prairie Mom suggested I post before and after photos of what will hopefully become our butterfly garden sometime later this season. My fiancé and I are huge fans and advocates of native gardening, which supports the natural ecosystem of a particular area. Even adapting native gardening in a small area, such as your yard, can really have a positive effect on the environment! I have adapted some native plants (that are safe for my Russian to eat) into my tortoise garden and you can see those in my photo albums or here: http://www.tortoiseforum.org/thread...-russian-tortoise-enclosure-and-garden.92343/
The ultimate plan for the front yard is to get rid of all the pesky lava rocks and "Windsor stones" and to replace that with new, fresher topsoil and wood chips. I think the wood chips in the backyard are a nice pine bark and we'll probably purchase the same again to match. By late summer, our butterfly garden will (hopefully) be full of milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), maybe Joe-pye weed (Eutrochium spp.), spiked blazing star (Liatris spicata), bergamot (Monarda spp.), and other plants that butterflies and hummingbirds love. Most of these plants should be native to Michigan or the Midwest area of North America, woo hoo! I've heard that if you want monarchs, plant Asclepias incarnata; and if you want swallowtails, plant dill (Anethum graveolens), so I may also get some dill. The milkweed is not only food for the monarchs, but it is also the plant where they lay their eggs. They cannot survive without milkweed! If this kind of gardening interests you, check out MonarchWatch.org. This is a huge project, so don't expect to hear back from me for quite a while!! XD
My fiancé is out studying for an exam, so I'll be getting a workout all by myself! Here's the very front flowerbed, just outside the front door. What you can see is a lot of dry, nutrition-less dirt where most of the lava rocks have been removed. I'm still racking some up from this area. They go down almost a foot deep! Under that layer is some plastic tarp, which will also be removed. Almost directly under that is clay. When the housing developments came through the area in about the 1950s or so, they removed all but a tiny bit of topsoil, leaving our darn yards with more clay than we need. We have a couple random plants down already, and they will need much more topsoil in the future. My fiancé wanted a heather plant; we put down a Chinese lantern plant that happened to really thrive; there is some milkweed; and a cardinal plant that may or may not live... These plants are mostly still dormant from the winter.
Just last night we finished pulling out that giant root ball from the hole you can see! My fiancé did a "caber toss" kind of thing with it yesterday and got 6'! It's pretty heavy. It was a large bush, severely overgrown, that the previous homeowner did not prune at all! The top branches were just about growing into the gutter at the roof when I chopped all the branches off last season. Plus its absence allows more sunshine into our front room window there, where most of our plants are growing (including my precious lime tree). I have 2 or 3 more stumps of these to remove this spring.
Here's a weeping cherry tree, which I'm thinking was planted with the original landscaping. Our neighbor across the street had one too and removed it because it doesn't seem to do very well. We've removed a lot of dead branches from it in previous seasons. Maybe it just likes to be pruned a lot. I'd personally like it entirely removed eventually and replaced with a native ornamental tree (assuming there is one). Serviceberries are nice. The weeping cherry drops a lot of sticks and makes quite the mess. On the right is my yucca, which hasn't grown much since I planted it last year (but maybe its roots are just growing first). I really like their flowers, so it's kind of a random plant for the butterfly garden. We like a lot of plants...
Here's the back of the front yard on the side of the house; you can see my finch feeder in the distance. Rabbits live under our back deck and often run under the fence, moving around a lot of the lava rocks. I'll be raking them and bagging them up to leave out in the garbage each week, a little bit at a time. There is NOTHING else you can do to get rid of these darn rocks! They're incredibly frustrating to get rid of, so I advise you to seriously consider whether you want these in your garden before purchasing them! The lava rocks really take up a TON of space, which means we'll more than likely need a giant pile of topsoil dumped off at our house to refill our flower beds!
It's only 44°F out today, so I'd better keep moving to stay warm. The sun has moved up in the sky a little so now it's back to work!