garden concepts

i am very excited to be working on our front yard.  the weather has been beautiful and the bird loves playing outside.  we spent a good hour, this morning, just digging and playing and having a fun time getting dirty.  even though the colorado sun can get pretty powerful in the summer time, we are very lucky to have some large trees which keep our front area shaded a good part of the day.  most of days are spent out here so, we want to do a little garden/yard/deck remodel which will hopefully give us more usable space.  right now, we have large bark mulch for our front yard area and i hate it because it is sharp and slivery.  on the other hand, i love not having to deal with watering a lawn. (there are big bonuses to not having much maintenance!) we also have a fence which looks ok but wasn't built well and is falling apart a bit.  our third challenge is our almost non-existent deck off of the living room.  we have a wonderful view of pikes peak from there but you can't do anything with it except let one person stand out there while grilling (and just enough space for keeping my two tomato plants).

so...we have big goals for all areas.  1. build a bigger deck  2. get rid of our current fence and build a new garden wall/fence a little further out.  this will make our patio area a bit larger.  3. landscape the front yard with more drought tolerant plants and lay down some smaller wood mulch.

step 2 is already in place and rolling forward.  we have cinder blocks that we will be using for the wall and have dug out and moved all plants that will be in the new fence location.  we are going to keep going on this part of the plan first and fingers crossed...work on the new deck very soon afterwards.  another future project includes using the long narrow side yard we have, on the east side of the house, for some raised garden beds and ...CHICKENS!  yes, chickens... i just have to convince luc first.  anyway, here are some images i have been pinning as concepts for our new area.