Curb Appeal

If there's one thing my house really lacks, it's curb appeal. It's a great little house, but there's not much to sell it as such from the road. I put in a bed along the front deck last year - that did a lot to help. But last week, Tracy, David and I put in another bed, right up next to the road.


The first step was removing the grass. That we did over the course of the last week and a half, a little bit at a time. We cut it off and carted it to the backyard, where we set it down as sod. Then we built up a retaining wall of sorts, since the yard slopes down from the street. Having built the wall, we got a truckload of manure and tilled it in to level off the bed (more or less).


On Saturday, finally having prepared the bed, we got flowers. We spent a while designing the bed - only to find out that most of the plants we'd planned on either weren't available or had already bloomed (and hence would be rather silly to put in right now). So we got recommendations on annuals (mostly) and brought home a good mess of plants. We laid them out, and then spent a good while putting them in. Here's the iris-side of the garden, from above(-ish):


The middle row of plants is a butterfly bush, a foxglove, 4 heliotropes in a box, and another foxglove. This part of the garden gets a good deal of sun, so we put the sun-loving plants on this side. There are marigolds, million-gold, heliotropes, some plant with purple-veined leaves who's name I'll have to look up, and petunias. There's also a red-flowering plant that's not blossomed, yet. Along the path (lower left in the picture) there are some impatiens mixed with the million-golds.


On the other side of the path we have more shade-tolerant plants: coleus in the middle (of different varieties) and million-gold and impatiens bordering. The Japanese maple I had in a pot on my deck is in the upper-right corner (barely visible) - it was right unhappy being on my deck, it would seem, so I'm hoping it'll like the new location better.