May Challenge - Take It Outside!

[peach]

Welcome to the May Challenge!

Our theme for the month is Take It Outside!

-Anyone is welcome to participate. There is no sign up, no membership, no secret handshake. 

-There is no competition. No voting will be done, no prizes, no winners. The purpose is to be motivated and kept accountable to get things done, and have some fun!

- You are welcome to take the theme and get creative with it, but I don't think anyone will have to look very hard to find something! Paint a fence, plant a flowerbed, spruce up your porch. Slap a new color on your front door, or spray paint a cool welcome mat. 

-Remember to take photos of your before and afters. At the end of the month we will do another thread where everyone can share what they accomplished! Again, just for fun - no winners or losers.

-Add the badge to your siggie for the month, directions will be posted below by Emo

-

[heygrey]

if the freaking contractor would show up, i'd have so much to show off here! new deck(s), new patio, fire pit... basically a whole new from yard. but the guy is taking his sweet azz time and it's making me insane.

hopefully we'll get a start on some of the outdoor furniture we want to build though!

[bunnymendelbaum]

Oh! If we get that rental I will be all I over this. The outside is in need of TLC, but has great potential.

[OrangeBanana]

We just got 4 inches of snow last night.....IN MAY! I threw away my kids boots and snow pants two days ago because they were completely worn out. I have a three foot drift in front of my shed. Can you tell I'm super happy about all this?

However, when the snow melts and the ground is once again dry, I will be happy to complete this challenge! I have a huge garden to plant and landscape plus a few raised flowerbeds to build!

[emoflamingo]

I will get the sig pic up tonight!

[*IMG]http://i39.tinypic.com/30hyop5.gif[/*IMG]

[lightbulbsun]

I'm excited for this one! We're getting an estimate for a paver patio this weekend, and I have a ton of stuff planned for the front yard/garden.

[simpsongal]

OMG - I have so much to post for this one. We're putting the finishing touches on our flagstone patio, so I'm counting it for May

[munkii]

We have so much to do, and we also need to hire a landscape architect. So...I'll try to convince H that May is a good time for the non-pro stuff (like tearing out dead hedges and tearing out the half-dead plum tree).

[sillygoosegirl]

I've accomplished so much outside in the last 2 weeks! But you wouldn't know it because I forgot to take before pictures. The day before yesterday, I found a downed tree with a 2-3 ft diameter trunk. We have less than 1/5 of an acre and I didn't know it was there. One of the ivy "vines" on it is bigger than my arm. That's how overgrown the yard was when we bought...

Actually, much of it is still that overgrown...

[sierramist03]

Does take it outside include moving because I think we are!?!!

[pitterwoo]

I just did a ton of yard work! unfortunately not at my house, but at my dad's. H and I spent a few hours today pruning and trimming in the yard. We made a huge pile of brush and fire wood. I was going to take pictures, but I was too lazy to get my camera.

[sassafrass]

We're doing so much in our crappy backyard. I wish I took more before pictures but it still looks terrible so I hope the after looks as good as it does in my head

[candreco]

I painted our front door over the weekend and added some big planters on the porch, but it's been raining and supposed to rain all week, so I haven't gotten after pics yet.

[Deleted]

So it finally got warm enough (read: no more snow!) to get my flowers in. This is my little flower bed. I don't do well with a lot of flowers and our house faces south on the wide open prairie so what the sun doesn't bake the wind blows away! The wagon is Hs from childhood. The stick bush is a rosebush that's just coming back to life..it's actually green and budding, just hard to tell. I dug the milk can out of the barn and the rock someone gave me when Hope died. Ignore the bottles. I have lots of Toddler help these days! It's also all edged out in the front but it's hard to tell with the grass that hasn't come back to life yet.

H is also going to kill me dead for slapping up a picture of his filthy truck. It's usually spotless but it's been parked in a field half the week loaded with seed.

[housegeek]

Alright! The kids picked out some flowers and we went to the dollar store, bought the cute buckets, and I drilled holes in the bottom. there's two more on the other side-


And we mulched this whole area and it looked so empty, so I made 2 2'x2'x16" boxes (for $4.50!) filled em up and planted a couple forsythia that we've have growing in a bucket for over a month. I might paint them eventually, or I'll just let the wood weather.

[candreco]

Finally got a break in the weather to take a photo, but it's still pretty gloomy out . Still need to do some serious weeding and get fresh mulch down in the front bed.

Before:


After:

[housegeek]

ooh nice! What are the red plants?

[Deleted]

Our front porch.

from a distance at Halloween, one month after moving in, complete with our dead basket of flowers.



After today.

 

[SusanBAnthony]

Attachment Deleted

I don't know why that is upside down, but if you click on it, it is right side up.

That is my "in progress, because these projects always take 10 times longer than you think they will" shot.  I bet our neighbors love us, lol.  I divided a bunch of irises, and am digging a new bed for them and some day lillies.  Then I am putting a mix of herbs and annual flowers in the former iris bed.  Seeds are planted (zinnia, bachelor buttons, hollyhock).  I haven't been able to do the annuals bc it has frosted the last 3 nights, despite the fact that we are past our last frost date.  I should be good now, but I am dividing my time between my vegetable garden panic and my flower garden panic.  

[emoflamingo]

We aren't doing anything major this year because we need to save up for a big landscape redo, but we did do this:



I also added some new flowers to our mailbox:

[lavender444]

We've done quite a bit these last few weeks.

I painted my kids little Tikes house (The before is not mine, but ours looked exactly like that)


We built and stained planters to go next to our garage.


Today I put in a little flower bed and started a retaining wall we plan to place between our property and the neighbors

[Deleted]

Here's what I did on Saturday.  No before photo but picture a side bed with a tall stack of 16x16 patio pavers along with weeds, ivy and monkey grass.  It looked horrible.  I got rid of most of the pavers a few days prior by posting them on Freecycle.  I dug everything up then put in new topsoil, plants and mulch.   I will probably add in a few more plants later.  I'm not in love with the grey pavers I used as edging but they were laying there in the bed so I just rolled them out and used them in the meantime.  Eventually I want to get something less bulky. But for now, I am very very happy with the results!





 

[sassafrass]

We had to have our septic pumped so we had to dig down about 2' to get to the opening.  We decided to put a collar on the opening so we don't have to dig as far anymore.  I don't really have any before photos but we had rotting railroad ties so we took them out, and put this in.  Please disregard the un-mown lawn and the top area is now filled in with topsoil and will be mulched.  sorry the pictures are so crappy.

[ktzmoh]

I made a big old redwood planter (24"h x 36"l x 18"w) to put on my patio. Now I need some dirt and some bamboo. We need lots of screening in our backyard, and this is going to help with that.

[lightbulbsun]

I updated my front garden by removing 3 boxwoods, removing sod to extend the garden area, splitting/moving hostas, and planting new salvia, dianthus, silver mound and dwarf oak leaf hydrangeas. 

Here's the garden from last year:







And this is what it looks like now:









All of the hostas were split from 4 original plants (and none of them are in the original location).

I still want to take out the uneven brick edging, but I'm really happy with how it looks now.  I can't wait for the hydrangeas to grow in so it looks more established. 

[munkii]

We ripped out 7 old shrubs that were impeding our walkway and were just old, dying, and ugly. We still have a lot of work to do (like rip out another 15 shrubs between the front and the back yards), but this is a nice start.

   

   

[april37]

I forgot to take a before picture. I know it doesn't look like much but before it was mulch and dirt (mostly dirt), weeds, and a bunch of dead shrubs. Because of the slope, all the mulch runs off when it rains. I'm not sure why the shrubs were all dead (we just moved here last spring and didn't do the original planting/landscaping).  We covered the ground with Mississippi River rock and planted new shrubs and flowers. We still have some more planting to do but it looks 100% better than before.

[peach]

We freshened up the front door with a new mat from Tarjay, planters, and a rag wreath I made

[peach]

We built some raised garden beds! Excuse the trashy fence - we'll get to it!

[pitterwoo]

I have been working so hard outside this month, last weekend especially. For memorial day I planted pinwheels in my boxwood planters and added flags.

I also weeded and cleaned up the garden. Put in tomatoes, peppers and herbs. Just went out and harvested some strawberries!