Dirt Canvas

L and I have been wanting to go with a drought friendly front yard for a while. With this in mind, we let our current lawn slowly die off. It wasn't much to begin with. It was mostly some sort of invasive weedy, straw type grass that kind of sort of covered the front lawn area with green. Not really though.

So after getting some free time and more importantly the motivation to do something, we started planning. For us to take on a project like this we planned it in stages. Doing a little at a time would obviously take longer, but also save us money. We culled thru magazines and local neighborhoods for examples of lawns we liked.

We decided to focus on the curbside area first. It's an area that we can sort of test things out on. The first order of business was to get someone to dig up what was left of the lawn itself. The dirt in the yard is not the greatest. It's a bit like dry hardened clay. It takes some doing to make it cooperate. I got our local tree trimmer to get some of his crew to remove the lawn.

L and I picked out plants from a local nursery that we'd gone to before. Over the past two weekends I spent the better part of the days moving dirt, planting, hauling heavy things around, etc. Here's the current state of the curbside. I still need to add decomposed granite to the pathway areas. It'll help differentiate them from the various plant sections.

I'm hoping to finish it up by the weekend. An hour or two a night after work should do it. Stay tuned.