The hardest part about transforming a yard is the waiting.
The photos I've taken are about 2 years apart. The best thing I can say to anyone looking to transform their yard is that you need to wait sometimes. Things need to grow, get fuller, get to the size they want to be.
This transformation started off relatively simple, the bushes NEEDED to go. They were pressed against the house, they caused moss and algae to start to grow on the siding and were a bit too big overall. It took us about 2 days to completely remove all of the bushes in the front of the yard, a borrowed landscape trailer and about 4 visits to the local dump, but after all that, the house looked like it took a sigh of relief.
We then got to the process of designing around what we decided to keep (the large oak and the two ornamental apples). I sketched out plans upon plans based off a wonderful book titled "Northeast Home Landscaping, 3rd Edition: Including Southeast Canada."
This was the baseline of what we were going to make and design around.
Don't be afraid to sketch it out, it will make your life easier and helpful throughout the process.
Following the design it now was time to start making it a reality. This is where the waiting came in. With what I could find in local nurseries and online, I was limited by what I could find compared to what I had initially planned. Now we have revamped the plan a bit, however I still do think it came out alright. I still wish I could've put my initial planned mow edge in, however, we ran out of time before we planned on moving.
Our next step was to clean up the hedges. The hedges were overgrown to an extreme. On average these hedges were between 12-14 feet tall and had even regularly began to re-seed the lawn with their berries. I cut back what I could with hedge trimmers, but the chainsaw came in handy again for the large trunks that had grown. Some were even 4-5" in diameter!
Again, the time for waiting began, with 12-14' hedges, some of the sections had grown tall, but thin. After about a year of regular maintenance, they finally began to fill in their own gaps and grow where they needed to.
In cleaning up the hedges, I found that the neighbor's side of the hedges was deeply trenched from years of rainfall washing away the soil. After getting permission to fill it, I filled it with soil, covered the entire area with stone and it ended up coming out amazing.
Below are links to tools I have used in the transformation as well as some of the products we used.
Happy DIYing. Good luck, have fun, be safe.
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