Yard Stuff: Return of the Beds

(Note: I wrote this post about a week ago, only to find out Blogger had some issue and lost my post.  How frustrating!  So, here's another go at it...)

With our average daily temperatures reaching around the mid-70s lately, John and I have found ourselves outside more and more.  Who could resist with a yard so full of beautiful beds, big ol' trees, and amazing weed forests??  We have to enjoy it while we can because before we know it, the horrible Virginia summer will creep up on us, bringing with it 90+ degree days coupled with stifling humidity.  Oh joy.  For now, we're absolutely loving our shady backyard, warm breezes, and the soundtrack courtesy of our bird friends.  Dexter and Chewie are having a great time, too, chasing each other through the yard and battling over sticks, even though I'm pretty sure we have enough sticks in the backyard for every dog in Virginia.

So, here's some exciting news for you... we're getting a fence!  Since we've moved in, we've dreamt about continuing on with our fence chunk to provide some privacy, a safe place for our boys to run around in, help delineate our property, and eventually serve as a corral for human children.  We first thought about fencing in the entire backyard, but that would be way too expensive for us right now, and who wants to go out and play in the poison ivy, anyways?  We revised that plan and decided we'd rather just fence in the front half of our backyard with a picket fence.  It'll still be tall enough to keep in our boys and allow an unobstructed view of the entire yard.  In preparation of this, we spent our last Friday night clearing a path for the fence along the back, removing leaves and pricker bushes for the fence dudes.  While I love working in the yard, I couldn't help but think I can't believe this is how I spend my Friday nights now... viciously attacking pricker bushes with giant garden shears, but I must say, it alleviates stress about as well as a couple glasses of wine.  It's hard to tell the difference, but here's a photo of our scooted-back leaves.  We actually reclaimed quite a bit of space.

John working the giant garden shears.

Then, of course, once we started landscaping, we couldn't stop.  We love the progress we've made in our front yard beds, but decided they could use a little more oomph.  It was back to Meadows Farms to wander around and try to find our best bets for adding color for our partial shade beds on the cheap.  We ended up with four more heucherellas (if you remember, we went with the "Georgia Peach" variety as part of our Shade Lovin' Container Garden).  This time, we chose two "Sweet Teas" and two "Golden Zebras".  We love their big, colorful leafiness, and the fact they're perennials, so we can enjoy them for years to come... assuming they don't succumb to our black thumbs.  We also picked up two flats of purple impatiens to complement the purples in our pansies.  Here is everyone in their new homes:

The left-side bed, complete with ghost Chewie.

A Golden Zebra and its flower friends.

The Sweet Tea heucherella.

Right-side bed.

Another view of the right-side bed.

We also finally got around to planting the remainder of our begonias.  We picked up another flower box for our entry way and stuck the begonias in there.

So, that was our landscaping efforts for two weekends ago.  Little by little, our yard is starting to look less like a neglected weed wasteland.  In case you're curious on the progress of the rest of our yard, here's a few more photos of random stuff...

These yellow flowers popped up out of the rattlesnake weeds.  Kind of pretty for a weed.

This azalea lives on the opposite side of our fence chunk.  His neighbor already flowered and lost its flowers, but he's just now starting to bud.  Interestingly enough, it appears to be a different variety of azalea, as its buds and flowers are much larger than its neighbor's were.

This azalea mirrors the other azalea, but on the yard side of the fence.  It's now just blooming, too, and has the larger flowers, but it also has pink and white flowers!  And in some places, flowers that are both pink and white, or a very light pink.

Here is our container garden.  Everyone is growing nicely, especially the Creeping Lamium.  Those pink and white flowers are a sort of new addition.  They're one of the zombie plants we thought were dead and tossed into the compost pile, only to have them sprout back up and flower.  So, we decided to give them another chance as long as they promised not to eat our brains.  Can't trust zombies, you know.

Finally, these are just some tiny baby berries I thought looked like alien eyes.  :)