Landscaping our Yard: The Parkstrip

When we moved into our house, the landscape was less than desirable.  That's the thing about building a house; you have to build the yard, too.  It's work that I love doing, but it is expensive!  So we are just doing it a piece at a time.  We recently finished our parkstrip, which was a huge undertaking.
This is what it looked like when we started back in July of last year:

And today, it looks like this:

It took a lot of work and a lot of money, but I think it turned out great.  I started writing in detail about every single step along the way, but soon realized that would take too long and be too boring, so here are some photos and the condensed version of the transformation.

There is a 3 ft diameter drainage pipe that runs along our park strip, about a foot below ground.  This made planting large trees impossible, so we opted for smaller trees than our restrictive covenants called for. 

So sue us.

The strip was full of clay and rocks, which we deemed unsuitable for trees and plants to grow in, so we dug out the areas that we wanted to plant things in and filled them in with good soil.  This took A LOT of hard work!

Next we had to define our squares in which our trees would be planted.  We did this with treated wood in hopes that it would last quite a while.

We also put down weed barrier at this time (but not where our trees were to be planted, just in the spaces between where we would put down river rock).

It started to take shape, which was exciting.

We used this board as a guide for leveling out dirt and river rock, but our kids and thier cousins found better use for it!

Then we put down river rock, planted our trees, put down more weed barrier around the trees, and mulched around the trees.  Lastly, we went around the nieghborhood looking for large stones to use as accents around the base of the trees.  We will also plant some onamental grasses as a final touch.

It was a lot of work, but I think it was well worth it. Our little trees are blossoming now, and they are just lovely.

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