Garden Fancy: Garden Timeline 2023

We did several projects and improvements in 2023 (more photos of which can be found here and here):

The Triangle Garden/Diagonal Garden

Because I've been trying to move my garden areas closer to my house to make it easier to maintain them, and decided to make a new flower garden within my picket fence. This also eliminated once of the small lawns that I have to mow with the push mower, which is good too.

My son removed the sod with a sod remover, the kind you kick with your foot.

And he also laid these pavers over gravel and sand.
I dug over the beds and removed as much runner grass as I could find.

By the end of Summer 2023, this was a pretty fabulous annual flower garden. In Autumn, I had the concrete guy pouring the new sidewalk sections (see below) cut pavers to fit the triangles at the front and back of the diagonal path.

New Front Porch

The biggest (or at least most expensive) project of 2023 was the new front porch that we had been hoping to have done for several years. I had to paint the old wood floor every year or it looked terrible because the paint wouldn't STICK to the wood. Plus some of the supports had become rotten, so the front steps sagged a bit when people walked up them. And there was a big HOLE in the floor that I had to cover with a paving stone so no one would put their foot through it!

The new composite deck is much nicer with a white metal railing and matching lattice, and I left a small planting bed under the deck overhang, where flowers are set off nicely in front of the lattice. And we had the cracked concrete in front of the porch replaced too. (The triangular sections of the diagonal path in the Triangle Garden had been completed by November.)

West Terrace

I also did a lot of work this fall on the other end of our house. In 2011 we had an addition built onto the side of house, and because the ground sloped up so much to it, we had a retaining wall built there. I planted boxwoods outlining the terrace, with a white metal pergola in the center, covered by two white wisterias. But the area became invaded by runner grass, the wisteria never once bloomed, and I planted the boxwoods too close together when they were tiny starts.

So in March 2023, we:

removed the pergola, wisteria, and most of the boxwoods from the West Terrace, leaving only every other shrub along the edge of the wall
my son laid paving stones on either side of the new steps that match our new composite front porch, making a pair of nice seating areas
I moved my collection of tree and intersectional Itoh peonies from another area to this, much easier-to-maintain spot, making them easier to enjoy when they bloom too

The newly redone West Terrace, with new paver seating areas and new steps to the house.

Began Eliminating Rainbow Border

In September I began moving plants out of my long Rainbow Border, which I'm eliminating. It had gotten pretty weedy and grass-infested, and many plants don't grow very well so close to the red cedar windbreak behind it. It was a huge border to maintain, and it only ever looked good in May-June, because annuals never seemed to grow well there (maybe because of the windbreak trees).

I moved many of the plants to other areas, including under our windmill.