Minimal and modern landscape design
Today we wrapped up the flower bed to the right side of our front porch stairs! Our sidewalk is being poured on Tuesday, so we wanted to get ahead of the game so that once it was poured we could knock out the left side! We knew we wanted minimal and modern landscaping so we put our must have list together and headed to our local nursery and home improvement store.
The flower bed to the right of our stairs is a SIGNIFICANT slope so we had to get creative since we wouldn’t be able to completely level out the yard. Below are the materials we used to create our modern and minimal landscaping in our front yard.
MATERIALS:
PREPPING THE AREA :
The first thing we did to create our minimal and modern flower bed was remove the excess weeds. We did that by using our weed eater and going all the way down to the dirt. We knew we were going to use landscaping fabric however we wanted to remove a majority of the weeds prior to laying it. This was a fairly quick part of the landscaping prep.
You can get a better idea at just how insane the slope is on the right side of our house with the photo above. We were able to get a cleaner work space once all the weeds were gone.
We did a rough outline with our landscaping timbers to see how deep we wanted the flower bed to be. You’ll notice below that we moved the timbers in a little…after we had already weedeated that depth. It’s fine though because we have a game plan for that in phase two of our landscaping design.
Once we decided on the placement for the timbers, we decided where we wanted our plant placement to be.
The plants all look really small right now, but they’ll be HUGE when they’re fully grown. I’ll try and put the exact dimensions at the end of the post.
The timbers were the perfect border for this slope. We decided on a double stack of timbers and connected them using our 1/2 drill bit and rebar pieces.
Here’s how we connected the two pieces of timber like noted above.
Next we prepared the ground for the edging. We got pretty solid edging, so we ended up going 2+ inches down into the ground using a shovel. The edging has a lip on it, which you fill with dirt. Then once the dirt is in the lip you just compact dirt on both sides of the edging to secure it in place.
The calm before the storm. Let’s get to work.
We rolled out our landscaping fabric and slightly overlapped it on top of the trench we dug for the edging.
After the edging was in we karate chopped (the newest gardening terminology) some dirt along the inside of the edging, along with the outside, making sure it was nice and compact.
Next we got to planting…First we started with our Tea olive. When planting our plants, we mix top soil, soil conditioner, and ground soil altogether.
Next we planted our crepe myrtle.
Finally we planted our japanese grass.
We didn’t want to waste any leftover materials, so we dumped the remainder of our soil conditioner and top soil with our ground soil before installing our landscaping fabric.
We rolled out the landscaping fabric on the inside of the garden bed, making a slit for the plants. Then we overlapped the fabric on the front side by the timbers for extra coverage.
Finally we poured our rocks into the perimeter of the garden bed and hose area.
Do you guys want to see the final result?!?!? Here it is!!!
