Family Yard Day Part 2

We are not landscapers, and we are not gardeners. Bean absolutely hates mowing the yard. I like looking at flowers but I don't want to do anything to take care of them. When we moved in, I was a little excited about the rose bushes out front. They bloom a beautiful bright pink. They also grow like crazy and along with the baby tree, take over the sidewalk leading up to our front door.

Any guest coming to our house has to walk along the far edge of the walkway to avoid brushing against these crazy plants. Here's a before photo:

Notice the crazy tree growing at all angles. Notice the ugly bushes all over that are not in bloom. And notice the cheap metal edging.

Since we haven't had a weekend off together with nothing to do in quite awhile, I decided we should do some work. Nice huh? We quickly agreed to rip out the rosebushes- 4 of them, trim back the tree, get up all of the weeds, trim the other bushes, put in a stone border, and mulch the entire thing. We also planned to edge around two other trees in the front yard with stones and mulch those. And of course mow and edge the lawn. I skipped my 11 mile walk.

Here is the after. I realize it doesn't look like much but it feels like breathing a sigh of relief to me:

No more ugly bushes! Nice stone edging! The tree is prettier and it's not in the way. We can walk down the middle of the sidewalk now! My favorite parts were trimming those bushes in the back- I tried to make them round; and putting down the mulch. Bean likes putting down mulch too. He really does not like getting the huge rosebush roots out of the ground- they were as big as my head with roots 3 feet out in all directions! We are thinking about putting in some flowers in pretty pots to the left of the tree...just not anytime soon. Simpler is better for non gardeners.

And we got to put Norton the Gnome next to our biggest rock.

We decided to put off edging and mulching the trees, but that will be an easy 1-hour project for another time. We finished the behemouth project for now.