It has taken a while for our landscaping to mature, and it does with all newly planted landscaping.  The first year or two is always a bit fraught, as you struggle to get the watering just right, deal with some plants dying for no good reason, and fix everything that wasn’t quite done right.  As our landscaping matures, we are starting to really love it.

We are pretty thrilled with how our front yard has turned out; our lavender is in bloom, and our lawn has finally come into its own over the winter and is much more resilient now.  I finally have it on a regular watering schedule and don’t have to water from above much, if at all.

We’ve had to deal with a few yard pests, like moles, which we’ve aggressively trapped as soon as they appeared.

We also had to deal with some persistent skunks.  We hired a trapper which ended up trapping 5 of them before they stopped coming around.

Our hedges have shown a nice growth spurt this spring.

One thing we’ve noticed is that with a lot of grading done on the property, we removed quite a bit of the topsoil and exposed the “hard pan” soil beneath it.  We should have amended the soil with more compost when we planted, but we didn’t really understand the need.   So it will take time and effort to build up good soil health and new topsoil.  To that end we plan on composting relentlessly and applying our compost around the yard everywhere we can, which will help add nutrients and microbes to the soil, and soften it up.  Any plants that don’t survive, or aren’t thriving, we will replant with a larger and deeper hole, and mix in more compost.

We recently watched a movie called Kiss the Ground, which talks a lot about how plants help to build a health soil biology by bring nutrients to the microbes that develop there, so it seems that just having a healthy, well planted yard will help transform the soil.