Over the past couple of months, Aaron and I have been trying to get down to business with our yard.  Last summer was not a good summer for us and the yard due to Aaron working out of town and me being large(pregnant) and a wimp for heat.  So after much convincing from a few people, we decided that we would go ahead and lay down mulch.  I only have a couple of pictures of this and the before picture doesn’t do any justice (it was wayy worse than the picture shows because we had already started weeding).  We chose black mulch because it really makes the plants pop, and we did not use any landscape fabric underneath.  It has made a HUGE difference in garden maintenance!  I might go out for 10-15 minutes every other week to do a quick pull of weeds, which is a big improvement on what it would have taken before.  We would weed everything and nicely turn all the soil and within a week, everything would be well on it’s way back, so I am glad we decided on the mulch this year.

Before:

After:

After completing the flower gardens, we needed to figure out what to do with the vegetable garden.  We never did plant anything this year because we really haven’t had much luck in growing the last couple of years.  There is only about two hours that the sun hits that part of the yard each dayso we figured our time could be better spent than maintaining a vegetable garden that doesn’t grow vegetables.  We first thought we would just take out the brick border and plant grass, but then thought it might work well to keep the border and put down cedar mulch as a base for play structures, and sand box etc. for Myles down the road.  This time we did lay fabric because that corner of the lot grows crazy weeds.  It all went down very well and really cleaned up the corner.  It’s been at least 3 weeks since we have done it and so far there is not a week in sight!

Before:

After: