Playing in the Dirt

Spring is here with incredible warm temperatures and yard work is finally back on the schedule! :)

We have a pretty big property, but most of it is taken by this HUGE detention pond which is covered in thorns and weeds and we can't do anything with it.  We are planning on reclaiming some of this space for our use again, but need professional help. Site visits have happend and we are waiting on some more quotes to come in. Since you can look into our yard from every angle, we decided on planting shrubs around and close it in to have more privacy (and at some point have a closed in space the dogs can run around)

Last weekend, we went to the nursery and picked up 5 Ligustrum Recurvifola to start with.

                                 

                

Digging holes in the ground, finding huge rocks which made it so hard to even dig anywhere close to the size we needed the hole to be.

But finally the first 5 shrubs where in the ground and we were exhausted

When we bought the house there were two shrubs planted on the right side in the front, but only 1 on the left. I'm all symetric and couldnt stand the picture of it. 

                          

                                       

I bought another matching shrub (it looked decent sized in the store) and planted it on the left side. It turns out it is very TINY. I give it a chance to grow (hopefully fast) I also put some more grass seeds down to match the other side.

One week of resting before we decided on digging 8 more holes all the way to the house

The fenced in area is our detention pond

When we bought shrubs 2 weeks ago, they looked amazing, big, thick grown. We decided on 7gal so we don't have to wait forever for them to grow to a decent size. Last week I contacted a different nursery (b/c of some price issues) Those things are expensive!! The guy told me that they are out of the 7gal and have no idea when to get more. I then bought 9x 3gal ones and got them delivered to the house free of charge. Awesome! You can already see that they are pretty thin, still in very good shape and really tall.

I put some in our already dug out holes but the 24" space inbetween each shrub (that was the recomendation from the landscape guy) seemed way too much. Those shrubs are too thin to be any kind of a fence line.

    

You can see the huge difference from the ones already growing for the past 3 years and the 5x 7gal ones.

I'm a NOW person (every idea I come up with has to be tackled right there and then) Since the 3gal didn't work out in that spot (we will keep them to plant on the outside of the detention pond!) I drove up to the first nursery and bought 6 more 7gal. I got the last ones (they are out now too) and you could see a huge difference in growth. They are tiny compared to the last ones we got. I took them home anyways.

Last night I made all of the holes bigger and planted 8 more shrubs. Some of the 3gal where pretty much the same size as the 7-ones and at some point I didn't care anymore. Maybe we plant some smaller ones in between?

There is always next weekend to play some more in the dirt! :)