Happy Patio

I'm pretty behind on blogging. Life's been a bit on the hectic side - with wedding planning, cake making, and mark happenings - and ya know, I still have this full time job thing, so it doesn't leave a lot of time for me to sit down with my thoughts.

Today's thought sharing comes to us courtesy of my wonderful soon-to-be husband and now landscaping aficionado.

When we bought our townhouse back in October, our patio space looked something like this:

Not too awful right? This is the cleaned up version. I didn't take any pictures of the dead rose bushes growing out of dust off to the right of where this picture was taken, or the ground completely covered in the fallings of the many trees on and around our patio. It was kind of a gnarly mess, so within the first month we were there, we cleaned it up, and got it looking like this:

Tim put down some funky wood chips to make the ground look less gross, we swept everything up, added my lovely purple-potted rose bush, replaced whatever was in the yellow pot with gardenias, got a new hose, and did some rearranging. You may notice on the far left of the picture of our dog, Panda, there is a tree stump? It's not just any tree stump - it belongs to perhaps the most pain in the ass tree ever. Now, I'm a big proponent of going green and saving the environment, so let's not cut down trees and all that, but for reals, this tree was awful. It dropped gross stuff everywhere, it water logged during the storms in January and whole branches broke off, it looked ugly, it was pulling up the fence separating our patio from our neighbors, and we generally just didn't like it.
So, a couple weeks back, my landscaping-almost-husband took action - starting with that tree. We went to Home Depot and spent way too much money on the following things:

• 1 ax
• a blueberry bush
• a rosemary bush
• another rose bush
• heather plant
• mysterious dahlias
• a pink plant I dont remember the name of
• 6 new pots for our 6 new plants
• 6 hunks of sod
• 2 bags of fertilizer/potting soil
• 2 bags of fancy Mexican rocks
• 1 box of Miracle Grow
• 6 pieces of mini black fencing

And by the end of the weekend, our patio looked like this instead:

Until next time...