Weekend project: Our small side garden and walkway

Isn’t it a great feeling when you accomplish something over a weekend?  Even if it’s just something little, it feels so good to be able to check something off the list.  For us, it was our small side garden and walkway that leads to our side entrance.

I showed you the before photo last week, but here’s a reminder.  It had a few herb plants that I transplanted into a pot last week.  The edging had all fallen out, the grass was growing over the side of the path and there were weeds growing between all the interlocking bricks in the walkway.  It was not a pretty sight!

And now it looks like this.  It makes me so happy to have it neat and tidy!

It was a lot of work though.  You know all those weeds that were growing through the cracks of the interlocking brick?  I pulled them all out by hand with my gardening knife tool.  The really good weed killers are banned in my city, and I didn’t have the patience to wait for vinegar or other natural solutions to work.

It absolutely amazed me how much the grass had grown over the walkway.  See where the shovel is in the photo below?  That’s where the edge of the bricks are!  The next three photos were taken on a tripod, so the camera didn’t move at all:

Crazy how much it had grown over!

We also had to bury all the plastic edging back in, which was a task in itself.  We used a shovel to pull back all the dirt.  My husband did that part mostly.  I tried, but the dirt was so hard I didn’t have the strength to pull it all away.  My husband also did all the edging of the walkway.  I’m sure I could have done it, but without a little muscle it would have taken me hours!

We are pretty sure the edging will last the season, but we’ll see if the winter pushes it all up again with the freezing and thawing.  Hopefully not!

Once the edging and dirt was all evened out we had a nice tidy garden bed to work with (albeit a small garden bed!):

We went to the garden center this morning to pick out a bunch of annuals.  I never know how many I’ll need, so hopefully these spread enough to fill it all in.

The dirt was all loosened up, so planting was easy peasy.

The whole area is really dry.  You can even see in the photos how lightly coloured the soil is looking, and I’m pretty sure it rained almost every day last week.  So I might have to water it a lot this summer.

I added a top layer of mulch to help keep some moisture in.  I really love how it turned out!

It’s just the tiniest little garden area, but it makes me so happy to see it put back together.   Let’s look at some more before and after shots.  Here is the sad state it was in, looking towards the front of our house, before we did anything:

And here is the same view after we tidied it up:

Another before shot:

And another after shot:

We really don’t really use the side door, but I keep opening it up to take a look outside at the work we did, and it makes me smile.  It’s just one little area, but it makes me feel more like it’s our home.  I can’t wait to see how all the flowers fill out as we get further into the summer!

Source : onelittleproject.com
Read more...