Front Yard Landscaping Refresh

This is basically the before shot, it's from last year but nothing has changed much since then, you can see the garden hose and the shrubs that will be going away.

The first thing we did was move the hose to the other side of the garage, it never looked right where it was anyway.  When we're finished the leftover river rock will cover the muddy ground under it.

These are the columns that will make up the fountain, the large one is fake and hollow (concrete/fiberglass) and has a hole through the top for the water to come out of, the others are real and solid, not a bad match huh?  It's already been called our Stonehenge so that will probably stick, sounds good to me.

This box gets buried in front of the columns to hold the water supply and pump for the system, it should hold about 15 gallons.

This is where the stuff is going to go, the box in the front and columns in the rear, a part of the area will be covered with riverstone and new plants will go in around that.

I wired a new GFCI outlet just inside the garage to plug the pump and LED lights into, I just need to drill a hole in the siding behind the gutter to hide the wires.

I decided to use a proper timer for everthing, this way it will come on and go off at the same time everyday and the schedule can be easily changed plus there won't be a big plug in timer hanging out of the outlet to get damaged or wet.

Digging the hole was no fun, below about 3" everything had to be done with a 20 pound pick bar.  Slamming that into the ground a hundred or so times makes the shoulders burn a little.

The hole has to extend all the way to the foundation so the auto topoff pipe can sit above the liner.

We laid out the underlayment and then the liner on top before putting the pump box in the hole.

You can see the pump line on the right and the auto topoff float and line on the left.

We filled in the space around the box with stones and started to fill in between the columns.

The box and the space around it hold about 26 gallons of water, after running it through the rocks for a few minutes it got really funky, I swapped it out before closing the lid, hopefully it stays clean for a while.

I had to shorten the wires from the pump and light, one of them was 33 feet long!

I tapped into the new garden hose line to add a connection for the auto topoff.

I was able to put a hose timer we had sitting around in line with the auto topoff supply, just in case the float were to stick open.  This way the worst that could happen is it would overflow for 5 minutes once and I would notice it before it's allowed to run again 3 days later.

We filled in the rest of the space with stones and trimmed the excess liner.

We picked up a few plants but have to figure out where they'll all go.

We got the plants in the ground and picked up a yard of bark mulch to spread in the newly edged planting beds.

Some of the plants may get too big but if that happens we'll remove the ones we don't want and let the others grow.

We finally got plants in the pots on the front porch, it was starting to look pretty bad without them.

We put a small bamboo plant in one of them, we'll see how it grows in the small pot for the first year and maybe transplant it next year.

The other two got dwarf boxwood trees, the same as what we have in the front yard right beside them.  Around it we put some ground cover, I think it has purple flowers in the spring.

We were able to pull an enormous amount of weeds out of the beds around the left front yard and get some bark down, it looks so much better now, trust me.

It did take us until July to get the yard looking respectable but I have to say, it's looks pretty hot now!

The space between the trees needed something so I found a small concrete garden pagoda, it's weathered pretty well already so soon moss will start growing on the top, which should look even more cool.

I added a waterproof LED light inside just like we have in the fountain and have it set on the same timer, much more unique than your garden variety Costco solar powered walkway lights :)

After adding the pagoda it seemed like the lights shouldn't be on all the time so we added another timer and created a separate circuit.

Now the lights are only on in the evening when they should be, it's cool to have that flexibility now.

I was never 100% happy with the way the it looked, the front area was missing something, I added these bigger rocks and a couple more plants to make it look less uniform.

I couldn't be happier with the way it came out, it really breaks up the space in front of the columns and creates a slightly enclosed area that will get even better as the plants grow.

We dug the hole far too deep so the water chamber lid was under about eight inches of rock making it difficult to access so I modified it with a smaller valve box who's lid is now near the top of the rocks.

It's not enough space to change out the pump but it is enough to change the water or check the level.

All that maple tree did was get in the way of the gutters, ruin the roof, and clog up the fountain, less than an hour of work took care of that problem.