When my step mom designed our front yard I was really adamant about wanting color all year round. I love flowers in Spring, but a yard that’s dormant for 6 months of the year is no fun. Lucky for me, Wendy knows her plants, so our yard is still pretty, despite the winter time

Here’s what it looked like about 6 months ago at the end of the summer when we officially finished landscaping

There aren’t nearly as many flowers in bloom, but we’ve still got some great color.

I have two absolute winter favorites. First, the Abelia Kaleidoscope which are those two great green and yellow plants with the orange tips

They’re much larger, and a lot prettier, than when we first planted them

My other favorite? The coral bark maple. The red bark is amazingly beautiful in winter, especially against the simple backdrop of the paint colors of our house

And the nandina firepower is definitely fire-y.

Things are really filling in, which makes me excited to see how things explode when Spring hits

Here it is last year when we planted

The cardboard weed block that we used is doing a pretty good job and I would say it’s been pretty comparable to high quality landscape fabric. There is one area right underneath the turret (where we forgot to put down weedblock) that is apparently a weed factory because the clover has just gone ape shit (that’s only a couple days after I weeded)

There is also a spot right along our neighbor’s driveway that likes to threaten us with an invasion of grass

Other than that though, the weeds around the yard are very manageable and I still only spend about 30 minutes every two weeks out there pruning and weeding, which is completely awesome. It really is a very low maintenance, but still beautiful, yard.

One thing that I’ve done in the last couple of weeks is make a yard care binder. Yup, a binder (nerdy organizer alert) for yard care. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and finally got around to it. You see, I’m no green thumb, and until about 2 weeks ago I didn’t know the name of 90% of the plants in our yard, let alone how the hell to care for them. But my step mom and I saved the tags from all the plants (and the few we lost I sent her a picture of them and she was able to recall what they were) and I pulled them all out and sat in front of my computer for about 2 hours and made a little cheat sheet for each plant

For each plant I put a photo (so I knew what the hell they were by picture because the name was going to do nothing for me without that), and then some general care instructions (when the plant blooms, when to fertilize, how to prune, etc.) I used the tags from all the plants, our Western Garden book, and the internet. Once I was done I emailed the file to Chris for him to print at work (hehehehe), and then I put it all in a binder I already had

Inside, I slipped all the plant cheat sheets into a sheet protector

I already had the sheet protectors on hand (I told you already, I’m a nerdy organizer), and they came in handy because when I take this outside to prune and care for the plants I won’t have to worry about tearing the paper or getting it all dirty. And now I know what all the plants are called and how to care for them, which is probably pretty important 🙂