Rocks. Lots of rocks.

With unemployment now being a prominent part of my life, I find myself caring a little more about my environment as I seem to be spending quite a bit of time in it.  One of the things that was on the top of my to-do list was my front yard (much to my husband's dismay).

Now because I'm absolutely terrible at remembering to take pictures, I don't have one that can show how awful and weedy our front yard was.  However, I did remember to take one before we covered all of the dirt with landscaping fabric.  We had already pulled all the weeds by this point, but it gives you an idea of what we were dealing with.

I'm not a garden person and I have no idea how to identify any plants other than dandelions (and I could be wrong about those sometimes too), so planting a flower garden wasn't something that I was willing to take on.  There was one thing that I knew I could keep alive though: rocks!

I had my husband call and order some grey rock.  My original plan was to drown out all the weeds with rock and call it good.  Nice and easy, right?  Rocks are easy to care for and they can't possibly be that heavy to move.  The initial delivery was 2 yards.  I looked at it and knew it wouldn't be enough for what I wanted to do, so he called again to order 3 more yards.  We now had 5 yards of rock dumped on our front lawn.

Holy f***ing hell.  It didn't really look too bad until we had to start shoveling it.  Shoveling, and shoveling, and more shoveling and beer and more beer and more shoveling.  After we had shoveled and spread 3 1/2 yards of the rock, we were done.  Not just our bodies and sobriety, but our yard.  We had used all the rock we could and now had to move 1 1/2 yards to the back yard to pile.  Oh, the fun we had!

After all that was done, I assumed I would be satisfied with how the front yard looked, but, of course, I wasn't.  Yes, the weeds and dirt were covered, but the rock blended right in with the house.  It was boring and needed some color and life.  I was also rather tipsy by this point so more work sounds like a wonderful idea.

We had a bunch of rocks in the back yard and few pieces of slate that we my husband moved over from the old house (he appreciates me), so we moved those up to the front and randomly threw them all over the boring grey rock.  Ugh, it still wasn't enough.

I decided to enlist the help of a friend who seems to be able to keep stuff alive.  We wandered our way down to the Home Hardware and found THE most enthusiastic garden person in all of times.  She was very excited to tell me all about my options.  I have absolutely no idea what she said to me, and just chose to pick the prettiest colors and hope for the best.  Her favorite of my choices was the bushy green thing.  She showed me, in detail, exactly how to "prune" this bushy creature.  After I kindly asked her to stop sabotaging my perfect bushy plant, I placed all of my purchases into the best hobo shopping cart of all times (it had pneumatic wheels!) and headed for home.  (Sadly without the shopping cart.  Clearly, the manager saw my intentions and assisted me with loading my truck and then took the cart and locked it up behind a gate with a padlock.  Jerk.)

3 days worth of work, a few back pain meds, 2 cases of beer, and $175 worth of plants and flowers later, I have this:

Like I said, I don't know anything about plants, but the lady at the Home Hardware claims that these ones are fairly easy to keep alive.  Especially the front bushy looking one.  I also have to prune that one, in case you didn't catch that.  Fast and with purpose.  With special sheers.  She was scary.....

She was wrong about this one though:

I think I killed it.

But, alas, how my front yard looks now:

Another project down, 756 to go!