Front yard refresh

You may recall that this time last year I was ripping out turf grass [link here] in my sideyard and replacing it with native vegetation.  This cut down considerably on the amount of time I spend maintaining the yard.  It also greatly reduced my water and fertilizer application and provided something more interesting to look at than grass.  I must have forgotten how sore my back was because somehow I decided to have a go with the front yard to further reduce maintenance and add some curb appeal to my otherwise boring house.

Let's take a look at what I started with...boring old crab-grass-infested turf between my driveway and my neighbor's:

Like any project I engage in, much more had to be done than just dropping new plants in the ground.  The area in the far left of the photo has always flooded; the area is 8-10 inches lower than the surrounding areas and both my gutter water and the neighbors pools badly in this location.  I started by taking scrap plastic and building sides and a back on an NDS drainage grate to collect water shooting out of my gutter downspout. 

Water collected from the gutter flows toward the right into a new drop inlet (the round opening that collects water and puts it in the pipe, rather than flooding 8-10" deep like before).

...then flows from the drop inlet (foreground) to a pop-up emitter out on the street.

At this point you can see all of the grass has been removed.  I found the second best tool to use for turf removal is the maddox--the yellow-handled tool two pictures up.  The first best tool is a tie between a sod-cutter that I couldn't afford or doing burnouts on the grass until it's gone.  I went with the less redneck approach, in this case.

While I was fixing drainage issues, I decided to tackle the one on the other side of the house too.  The weeping willow tree on the corner has extremely evasive roots, so it clogged the gutter system, causing water to overflow at the bottom of the gutter rather than flow out to the street.  Sub-optimal.  In this picture, I replaced 100% of the pipe since it was root-bound and gave it a new path out to the street.  As you can see, below, I actually had to tunnel under the roots to get the pipe out to the street.  I would rather get poked in the eye with a stick than do this job again.  The pipe coming from the right comes from the gutter at the back of the house and the one right in front of my feet is from the front gutter.  Problem fixed.

With drainage fixed, sprinklers capped and the soil amended, Hanna and I hit Green Acres Nursery for plants.  We decided on some black and blue sage, a feather reed grass, crocosmia, echinacea, yellow cone flowers, yarrow, snapdragons and some purple verbena transplanted from the sideyard.  Don't assume there was method to the madness, we used the completely random "oooh that's pretty plant approach."  None of it is in bloom right now, but here's the end-product.

The process was similar on the other side of the driveway.  Remove grass, cap sprinklers, break up and amend soil, lie on dining room floor with bad back, add bender board, add plants.  We also decided to add some stepping stones to make approaching the house easier when there are cars in the driveway.  Lifting those was also good fun and required another trip to said dining room floor.

Finally I made some changes to the irrigation system.  The timer is now a smart timer, which measures temperature and rainfall and adjusts the irrigation schedule accordingly.  So far as the weather has cooled off it has dropped probably 30-40% off the summer watering schedule.  When we get measureable rainfall it suspends irrigation until after the event.  I've seen it suspend watering for as little as 14 hours and as much as 95 hours.  In the photo below it measured 2.23 inches of rain and it suspended irrigation for 95 hours.  I like knowing this timer will take care of the watering while I'm in Canada during the summers.  If it proves to be unreliable, well, at least it has a pretty blue screen.

I also replaced all of the 14-year old leaking automated valves with new high quality ones, pressure reducers and sandfilters (for drip only), along with screw-on couplers so they can be more easily removed next time I have to service one.  And to show you just how OCD I am, I sprayed all of the couplers with black rubberized plasti-dip so they're all matchy-matchy.  Technically they're more protected from freezing, but I care more about the bling factor.

Finally, I replaced all of the old worn-out sprinkler heads with new high precision nozzles.  I'm sure it's difficult to tell the new ones from the old ones, so I'll give you a tip, the new ones are on the left.

So, any interest in seeing the before and after pics?  No?  Well, too bad; here they are.
(When I bought the house):

Final product:

On the left side of the driveway we planted a variety of clumping grasses (like Dianthus, Armerias and Blue Fesue), along with different colored Lantana, a Mexican Sage, some Blanket Flowers and May Night Sage.  The Chinese Pistache tree in the front yard puts on a nice fall display as well.

That's it for now!