A Paradise in the Making

The interior of this home was in good shape when we moved in  but all the yards were badly in need of trimming.  The first week we were here, Bruce dived right in and began trimming all of the trees in the backyard so they weren't smacking us in the face every time we stepped outside.

All fourteen of them!  

We have a forest of deciduous trees in our backyard.

Meanwhile, I (CC) tackled cleaning up the front yard.

The front yard area does not have as many trees as the backyard has.

There's just one large silver palm in the center of the lawn,

and 

five (5) mature Cycads are scattered in the front flower beds.

BUT

none of these plants looked like they had ever been trimmed!

AND

There were massive fire-ant mounds all over the front lawn and flowerbeds.

It took both Bruce and I  two weeks to get all of the  Virginia Creeper pulled off of the silver palm tree,

 and it took me another week to remove all of the dead fronds skirting the cycads.

Meanwhile, we were both engaged in a constant battle with the fire-ant colonies that had taken up residence all over the front yard.  TBD who is winning that war; every time I think they're gone, we find a new fire ant's nest.

The previous tenant had used two sideyards on either side of the house as utility storage areas

The yard on the North side of the property (above)  was covered from the fence to the house with a healthy (but badly overgrown) St Augustine lawn.

I plan on making this area a cut-flower garden and have been carefully removing 18" of the healthy turf from along the fence and house walls to make room for the new flowering plants. 

The yard on the Southside of the property (shown above) appears to have been used as parking for a boat &/or a recreational vehicle. This area was supposed to be covered from the fence to the house with St Augustine grass but instead has a large area adjacent to the house that is barren and void of anything but weeds. We are planning to turn this into a small raised bed vegetable garden. So far, we have managed to weed and covered the barren area with landscape cloth.  Then we moved all of the potted herbs that we brought with us onto the landscape cloth. 

As you can see from the photos above, we haven't put many plants in the ground. Virtually all of the plants we brought with us from Pawleys Island remain in the pots we brought them in, as are all of the new plants we have purchased since we came here.

In part that is because we are still waiting to determine how much sunlight and/ or shade different areas get,  so they will all have a suitable light exposure.  We also are waiting to determine how much difference there is in rainfall between Summerville and Pawleys so we can figure out how much watering we will need to do in different portions of the yard. (There aren't any sprinkler systems for any of the yards).

Even though our yard is not yet the lush garden of Eden we are envisioning it will become, we are pleased with the progress we are making, and our new neighbors are ecstatic that we are keeping everything so trim and tidy.  That alone is a huge improvement in their minds.