JTK: Landscaping

I know I have been a crappy blogger lately, but in my defense Jonathan and I have been super busy manicuring the outside of our house. It all began when one day Jonathan decided that he wanted to build a pergola. The next morning, he got up early and bought all of the necessary supplies and we spent the entire weekend building this pergola (see below)

Then before we could landscape the area, we had to put in the sprinkler system which was a lot of effort in itself.

I could not be more happy with the way the final product has turned out. I love our backyard because it is our very own little piece of bliss.

So our next project was our front yard, which also required more time consuming sprinkler lines to be installed.

The cinderblocks in front of our house were indisputably HUGE eyesores that many of our neighbors were thankful to see leave. Apparently they had been original to the house since the 1950's!

So the picture below was taken after we landscaped and while I love the way the landscaping turned out, I still really want to repaint the outside of the house - possibly a really light grey, or a really light tan with some black accents? Regardless, the mint green needs to be gone!

Now I am already excited for next spring/summer to see how everything matures. I am also really curious where all of the tulips will come up because I threw a lot of different bulbs randomly throughout the flower bed. Should be interesting :)

Our garden has been another huge project. We started out with this massive play set (below) that we needed to get rid of. Luckily we were able to sell it online - gotta love KSL classifieds -A couple came and paid us cash, and hauled it away and we did not have to do a thing!

Our tomato plants are legitimately 6 feet tall! I guess two truck loads of fresh manure will do that for a garden, right? We have already been eating a ton of fresh lettuce from the garden and now we are excited for tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, pumpkin, and zucchini

And our very last project was an area of the yard that does not have a sprinkler line. We planted three aspens in the spring, but the area needed a little more help before we could really say that it was "done".

Originally we were just going to put down mulch and nothing else, but we decided to plant water-wise-natural-to-Utah plants so hopefully they do well with very little water.