I am sure these landscaping posts are riveting, but I really enjoy seeing how far we’ve come, because we still have so much work ahead of us, and sometimes you need a reminder that you’ve actually accomplished something.

If you read my Landscaping, Part One post you have a pretty good idea of the work that went into getting part of our property cleared, so that we could improve it but also, begin the process of starting my flower garden.

After getting things to a decent place, we started the work to improve and breathe life back into the foundation of our property.

I plan to share some recent shots of where we’re at now, possibly a part three ect…but first, where we started this process, in 2011 and haven’t stopped since.

Below is some of that progress…

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Circa 2011, Before. As I’ve mentioned before, we did all the work ourselves, so I’m sure professionals would have done things differently and better. I decided to use my fence as a border for starting my flower garden.

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Circa 2011, After. You’ll see some random plants in these pictures. I didn’t have a plan yet of how I wanted to lay my garden out, but I still planted a few things because the work was taking a lifetime and I needed to feel like I was going to get there eventually. That large hydrangea was here when we moved in.

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Circa 2011, Before. Because our lawn is not flat removing the grass was insane. We rented one of those sod cutter things but it barely worked for us, so we had to do most of the removal ourselves.

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Circa 2011, After. Currently this area has had to be expanded several times because my garden keeps getting larger and larger. Eventually it will come out around that large bush we planted nearest to the fence.

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Circa 2013, Before. Once the inside of the fence was getting established I moved onto the outside of the fence and started to put in beds.

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Circa 2013, After.

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Circa 2013, Before.

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Circa 2013, After. I like to put small garden fences around any new bed outside of the fence, so that the young plants have time to get established incase something decides to step on them.

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Circa 2013, we also put in a bed by our garage.

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Circa 2014, Before. I decided I wanted to extend the first bed we put outside of the fence, but first I needed to clean up this area. The large cedar tree was removed later that year by the electric company. It had a lot of problems, but I was still begrudged to see it removed.

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Circa 2014, After.

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Circa 2014, We had a lot of large bare spots on our lawn due to neglect and from when we had to remove huge weed bushes and their stumps. This was when we started to really work to improve the actual lawn.

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Circa 2014, we tilled the ground, fed it and laid grass seed. We also scattered grass seed like crazy people all over our property and under trees and added fertilizer. It’s amazing how it has changed and how far it has come. The grass is so lush now and there’s actually grass under the trees too!

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Circa 2014, grass starting to sprout!