DIY // A Spring Ready Yard Makeover

The weather the past few days has been pretty dang nice, which means that it wasn't raining...finally!  I swear, this year we've had the most rain in history.  That spells overly exhausted for this SAD sufferer.  Luckily, I was able to boost my mood and our curb appeal at the same time.

It wasn't much but I picked up two evergreen azaleas and three anemones at Costco yesterday.  Then we cleaned up the yard and dug out two flower beds, one around our pine tree and one around our oak-ish tree (still not sure what it is.  It might be a cherry? or dogwood?  I really have no freaking idea.)  I chose to plant all five of the plants under the pine since I wouldn't have to deal with any surface roots.  I also took the two creeping myrtles that I had planted in pots last year and re-planted them under the pine tree, as well as 4 dahlia bulbs.  I still need to add a few plants, but with the addition of the brick border (the bricks are from a patio we removed) this little flower bed is looking pretty damn good.

So, here's our before...

The pine tree is in the background.  The cherry(?) is in the foreground.

And our mini After:

See those pallets up in the top right?  We're repurposing those into our compost bin.

That little twig in the center is my attempt at making a start from the branch I broke off...hey, doesn't hurt to try.

The little man got his mitts on all three of the anemones...poor flowers never stood a chance.

With the last bits of daylight I made a BBQ pad out of some more of our bricks, while the hubs mowed the yard and then applied lime & fertilizer to help battle our issue with moss.  The next sunny day we get I'm going to lay the brick for the flower bed around that other mystery tree. Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy (ugh.), so I'll have plenty of time to do some plant research.  I'm looking for low-maintenance & hardy plants for Zone 8...because this lady pretty much has a black thumb.  Luckily watering will not be an issue here. For those of you with a green thumb or even a brown thumb, any suggestions on plants?