Front Yard Landscaping Plan

Let’s talk about the front yard landscaping plan for our Colonial Farmhouse.

Plan is actually a loose term.

It’s more of an idea floating around in my head.

Think big picture priorities, not a deep dive into the details.

Honestly, that’s my modus operandi 99% of the time.

I’m much better at wrapping my mind around the big picture than I am with flushing out the tedious details of a project.

Here’s how the front yard looked when we were considering buying the Colonial Farmhouse in April 2019.

I can’t imagine why no one had made an offer on the house yet.

Here’s another view of the front of the house when we finally closed on it in June 2019.

Just your garden variety case of the garden taking over everything in its path.

If you’ve been following along in the last year, you might remember that we had some help from the town in dealing with all the forsythia bushes that were trying to take over the front of the house. You can read all about how 75-feet of bushes was cleared in approximately five minutes here.

That was just the start of Project Reclaim Our Front Yard.

The rest of the front yard landscaping plan involves digging everything up.

Well, not everything. Just all the stuff that’s in the way of my fuzzy plan coming to fruition.

Here are the front yard landscaping plan priorities:

• Address the uneven nature of the sidewalk. We will probably remove the uneven part and replace it with a stone path. I don’t have to go out on a limb to guess tree roots are what has caused the problem.
• Camouflage the concrete cap that is covering an old well. Maybe someday we will figure out how to use less concrete to cover this well, but for now we will focus on the jazz hands distracting and redirecting the eye.

That old well covering was clearly a problem area for the previous owners too.

They attempted to conceal the area with a literal flower bed for a ‘person’ made from ceramic flower pots. Actually, their plan worked. We didn’t know there was a huge concrete slab under that ‘flower bed’ until we dismantled it.

For those of you wondering, I could not give away that flower bed for free. I tried and tried. There were ZERO takers on Facebook Marketplace.

Continuing on with the front yard landscaping priorities:

• Not only is the old well causing us landscaping problems, the current well is too! We need to camouflage and protect the current well head. It is hiding under a green milk can. A milk can is an interesting choice for a well cover, but totally out of place in the middle of the yard.
• Remove the large posts that form up a flowerbed on the left side of our front porch. This is the only flowerbed that is built up in this way, so it doesn’t really flow with any of the other landscaping or my future plans.

• Remove grass around tree. Reshape that area into a flowerbed that mimics the curve on the stone wall opposite this area. In my head, this part of the plan is going to be awesome. It is the implementation of the plan where things sometimes go awry.
• Make a stone path that leads off of the sidewalk and takes you to the front of our sunporch. There is already a stone path on one side of our sunporch, so I would basically just finish connecting the path to the sidewalk.

• Cut down three birch trees along rock wall because they lean against the power line coming into the house. If you watched our Instagram stories awhile back, you will know that we already cut down one of the trees. (The one on the right.) The power company said these trees are our responsibility and they won’t fix the power line coming into the house if our trees damage it.

• Remove the rocks in the flowerbed on the right side of our front porch. I’m not actually sure why they are here, but no other flowerbed is covered in rock slabs, so it doesn’t make sense. Plus, I’m going to need these rocks to make that path I talked about earlier.
• As a side note, I’d like to paint our front door this summer. We also need to fix the trim around the door. We removed some of it to install a hidden, retractable screen door and never put it back up. Project fatigue is real, folks.

The last part of my landscaping plan is pretty simple.

• Plant some plants that will look somewhat decent most of the year and that have a decent chance of surviving when I neglect them. I have no idea what these plants will be, so I’m going to need suggestions from all of you. Any takers?
• Expressly forbid any weeds from growing in this newly created masterpiece. (Just wanted to see if you were still paying attention. You get a million bonus points for reading this entire post.)

I was totally serious about getting your input on what to plant in my flowerbeds. Where are my detail-oriented, plant loving people?

I have no idea when I’ll be ready to start planting, but it will make me happy to be prepared for that eventuality.

We live in planting zone 6b, if that helps you make suggestions. Did that make it sound like I knew what I was talking about?

Oh, good.

Fake it til you make it!

Here are some other outdoor-related posts you might enjoy!

Living in Ireland: Spring Flowers in Our Yard

10 Must See Places in Ireland if you Like Castles and Nature

How to Restring a Zero Gravity Reclining Chair