At the end of the day, in the springtime, you should smell like dirt!

I LOVE springtime.  The weather is finally warm enough that the kids can just run and play outside.  Thankfully, I do not have a grass-only lawn, so my girls bring me bouquets of flowers everyday!

Spencer and I have been doing some MAJOR relandscaping to the front of our house.  We've been at it a month and are about 1/2 done.  Here, we are eating a picknick dinner so the girls can eat and we can work.  Well...Heavenly Father sent us a thunderstorm instead.  So we watched the storm move in and then moved inside and watch the Princess and the Frog!

The Heirloom Hydrangea my parents gave us last year is doing great and will even flower this year!  The Hydrangea is a clipping from plants that we can trace back to the 1800's!

We built a flower box with landscape timbers about 2 feet from the house all along the front.  Then I moved all my bulb plants.  We have iris, lilies, amorylis, gladiolis, and spring lilies.  I still need to move my society garlic, but it's not all up yet.  The rest will be grass.

We also built a box at the front.  This is the girl's flower bed.  They will get to pick out the flowers every year.  Last year they chose snapdragons and marigolds.  But we didn't have the box so the weeds dominated the landscape.  This year, they choose African daisys and petuntias.

Here's a look at our newly remade front!  We pulled up all the overgrown juniper shrubs and will have grass instead!  It will look (and feel) great once the grass has grown in!

And here is the 1/2 that we haven't finished!  We'll build another box around the base of the trees and just keep it mulched.  Then we'll cut back the weeds, smooth out the dirt some, and grass the entire thing.

But first...we have to take care of our erosion problem!  We are in the process of building some retaining walls.  We'll probably end of with 2 tiers up to the top.  Then the side will just be a smooth hill with grass.  Cross your fingers...we are hoping to be done with the retaining walls this week and maybe done will the entire project in two weeks!

Then we can get our act together and build some raised beds so we can have home-grown veggies all summer!