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I can’t believe Christmas is almost here! For those of you out there like me who wait until the very last minute to wrap gifts . . .
. . . I wanted to pass along these fabulous FREE gift tags, from Inside a Black Apple:
They’re adorable! Download them here, then just print ‘em out and stick ‘em on your packages for an extra special touch!
Happy wrapping!
This is my favorite ornament: my husband’s childhood handiwork . . .
Hope you all are enjoying the holiday season!
A couple weeks ago I showed you the pretty respectable job we did sprucing up one corner of our back yard. Well, the success went to our heads, and Ben and I thought we should just push on through and get to work on Phase 2 of our landscaping plans. So the last two weekends we worked our little heinies off in the back yard, and I’ve been too sore even to blog about till now! You may remember that last time I alluded to a flagstone patio being in the works:
Well, we had a go at it, but you’ll notice there was a bit of a problem:
The patio was about two or three inches below ground level! Oops… So, to our utter dismay, we had to tear everything out, add a bunch more sand, and then lay the flagstones all over again. After a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day of hard work, we managed to fix it. And after another day of back-breaking labor, we even managed to get some green stuff planted around it! So here’s what it looks like now:
Much better, right?! You can see we’re not quite finished filling in all the cracks with sand, but this time it’s at least level with the ground! And I think the plants around it add a lot. Here’s a wider shot:
We tore out the overgrown bush along the fence in the back, dug a new bed, and planted a magnolia tree:
We also planted some fast-growing jasmine vines along the fence there, so hopefully we’ll get our privacy back soon!
Ben and I are really quite proud of ourselves for doing all this work — physical labor is not my strong suit, nor is patience, waiting for all these things to grow! But we are rewarding ourselves for our hard work by hiring someone to take care of Phase 3 in the back yard: putting in a deck! The contractors started today, so by Thanksgiving, we should have a gorgeous cedar deck where this not-so-impressive view used to be…
I can’t wait to show it to you! (Oh, and don’t worry — sod is in the plans for the spring!)
That’s what Ben and I have on our hands now that our two ridiculous dogs have destroyed every last shred of landscaping that existed in our back yard when we moved into our house in March. We no longer have plants, shrubs, or even grass back there! It’s now pretty much nothing but dirt and gravel; it looks a bit like a third-world country.
Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I don’t have much of a green thumb; I’m actually more of the black thumb variety. And while I flatter myself that I did a pretty decent job of decorating the interior of our house, I am absolutely clueless when it comes to designing a landscape. I have no idea what grows in Texas soil, what should be planted in sun, what should be planted in shade, what needs lots of watering and what doesn’t, what will stand up to two blundering sheepdogs . . .
So, to save myself the trial-and-error ordeal, we hired a landscape designer to come in and tell us what to do. And boy, did he! Daniel from Colorful Impressions gave us a killer design for both the front and back of our house, keeping our lifestyle and budget in mind. Now all we have to do is make it happen! Our plan is to do things in phases, starting with the back yard — which is in the most dire need of help! So we got started last weekend by doing some planting in the corner of our back yard around our giant pecan tree. Here’s a before shot:
Ick, right?! It was an ugly mess. But after a very productive trip to the North Haven Gardens nursery and a long, hard weekend of tilling, digging, planting, and watering, it now looks like this:
Much better, right?! For those of you interested in this sort of thing, I’ll tell you that we planted yaupon holly, oak leaf hydrangea, spring bouquet viburnum, and — my favorite — an oshio beni Japanese maple that I’ve named Jasper. We also planted lots and lots of little vinca plants, which will hopefully grow into some nice ground cover. The vinca is camouflauged in these shots by the thousands of pecan tree leaves that are falling on it, but you can see it (and the viburnum bushes) a little better in this shot:
The best news of all is that everything we planted is still alive after one week! That’s a pretty big accomplishment for us — both the dogs and we managed to keep from destroying it! We’re so high on our success that we’re already looking ahead to the next project: laying a flagstone patio off of our garage . . .
Yikes. Please pray for us! 
(And bonus points to you if you can spot all the dog toys in this shot — I see three!)
