Landscaping.

This post is insanely late... we did this project months ago, but I'm just now getting around to showing everyone. (bad blogger!) Hopefully this super long post will make up for it.

One of the first things we wanted to tackle before we got into the serious heat of summer was to do some landscaping. So we rallied up our gardeners (ie. my dad and brother) and got down and dirty one weekend.

The weekend started with a very big shipment... a housewarming gift from my parents!







Needless to say, we were jumping with excitement on Friday night and woke up very early Saturday morning to start the day.

Before any of the fun started: a before picture of the backyard. (by the way, how lucky are we to not have any back neighbors and just gorgeous trees?)



As soon as the digging started, we realized that to complete our plan - we would need to do some rearranging with our underground sprinklers. So, I was sent to Lowe's with a very detailed list for sprinkler extension parts.



I wandered the aisles for far too long (stopping only briefly to grab a bottle of water to hydrate me on my journey through the intimidating and never ending buckets of what seemed to look like the exact. same. thing.)

I was so surprised when I came home to find that so much work had been done! Roy and my dad had laid out all the weed barrier and planted most of the plants!



After the planting and mulching, we started the daunting and exhausting task of laying out the rocks.



The end result is great and we even had enough to use rocks in our front yard as well!



The back porch got spiffed up with some patio furniture!



Like any middle easterner's backyard, now ours is filled with tons of fruits! so far we have kumquats, tomatoes, meyer lemon, figs, and a unknown citrus tree!

Kumquats



Fresh mint.



We even found some awesome solar powered lights to go in our front flower beds.



Which look great at night!



For comparison, here's a before of our front yard.



And an after:



*Update: the best part of my tardy blogging is that I can now give an instant update to all the hard work we did back in April.

Tomatoes are getting big!



Some are giant!



Our crepe myrtles are growing.



And my knock-out roses are definitely knockouts!



I'm so happy to say that thanks to our dedicated weekends and constant watering - our yard continues to look even more amazing! It was hard in the beginning (living in apartments for so long, we never had to worry about mowing the lawn or weeding!) but its definitely been something fun to do on the weekends that brings us so much satisfaction when we sit on our back porch at night and enjoy the view.