Springtime Gardening

Over the weekend, we did quite a bit of yard work to get our front and back yard looking pretty and fresh for spring! Jeff put new mulch on all the flower beds last weekend, so it was time for new flowers! This is the first spring we've been in the house, so it was our first time to fix up a yard in the spring. We may have gone a bit overboard. Oops.

So. Many. Plants.

We started the weekend with a trip to Houston Garden Center, and we left with twelve 24-packs of flowers and three sage plants. Plus four pots of Gerber daisies.

We filled the back of the Pathfinder with lots of plants!

When we got home, we got to work filling the flower beds with flowers! Our front yard has one really big flower bed with a lot of bushes, and it had a big empty area in the center. I've wanted to fill the empty area with flowers ever since we moved in, so I was pretty excited.

Lots of flowers filling in the gaps!

We filled it with these periwinkle flowers...

...and these yellow ones.

Now there's a cute little army of baby flowers brightening up our front yard!

The back yard needed even more work. We planted four crotons in the left bed when we did our big backyard project last fall, and they were supposed to just be placeholders until we bought something else (we found the crotons super-cheap at Home Depot, so we just stuck them in the ground). We never thought they'd live through the winter, but we had such a mild winter here that they made it. But, their leaves all fell off, so they just looked ridiculous. So we pulled them out of the ground and put them in pots instead.

Poor little scrawny crotons. 

Hopefully I didn't shock them too much by pulling them out of the ground.

Grow, little croton, grow!

Where the crotons used to be, we planted some sage bushes. Then, we added a row of periwinkle flowers and a row of white flowers across the front of the bed.

Sage bushes

Jeff planting flowers!

We trimmed up a few low limbs on the tree to make it more tree-like, and we planted a bunch of swamp irises around the bottom of the tree.

To the far left (where the fourth croton used to be), I planted four little Gerber daisy plants. I love how joyful and bright they look! Gerber daisies are the flower of my sorority, so they always remind me of my college years.

Ever since we planted the big corner bed on the right side of the backyard, I've been dying to plant rows of flowers in the front of it. That's how I always envisioned it, so it was so fun to finally make it look the way I saw it in my head!

We did white and maroon flowers in front of the buford hollies and bottle brush bushes, and semi-circles of red flowers in front of the crape myrtle.

I'm so excited that the bottle brushes are blooming... so pretty!

That's it! I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out. We're total novices at this whole gardening thing, but so far everything seems to be working out just fine (we even managed to keep the tropical crotons alive through the winter - crazy!). 

Anyone else doing a bunch of gardening lately?