The front yard was not in great shape.  The bed next to the driveway was chock full of bluebells (which has come to be a dirty word around here), which actually have nice little flowers for a couple of weeks in the spring but are noxious weeds otherwise.  We also found them sprouting in the bed on the other side of the yard, and when we investigated we found that that previous owners had covered them with weedcloth and beauty bark to hide them.

So we decided to take this last weekend and have a go at cleaning things up.  The goal was to get rid of the weed cloth and dig up all the bluebells, and then dig up the bed next to the driveway completely and replace it with a couple of raised beds for gardening.  Before starting, the yard looked like this:

We started by pulling up the weed cloth and removing all the beauty bark, and then Sarah weeded and added new mulch (and did some maintenance on the rose bush).

 Then we attacked the bed by the driveway.  We had to remove all the loose bricks lining it (the number of loose bricks we’ve purchased with this house boggles the mind), and then we removed half of the walk way to make eventual room for raised beds.

Then we got to work digging out all the weeds.  We had the bricks and slabs out by about noon on Saturday, and it took us until Sunday night to dig through the entire bed and get all the bulbs out.

Then I built two 4′ by 8′ frames of cedar 2-by-6’s and painstakingly leveled them.  We filled them with mulch and compost from City People’s Garden Store, and the end result came out pretty nice, I think!