Transforming A Front Yard On A Budget | Curb Appeal Upgrade || Budget Gardening

What started as a simple front walkway garden cleanup turned into a major garden bed makeover.

NOTE: The weed is Bishop’s Weed or Gout Weed, not Queen Anne’s Lace. 😊

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Hey budget gardeners, Feed Loca here. Join me today as we tackle weeding and planting my front walkway bed. So, let’s go. [Music] We are on the west side of my house and this is my front yard. You can see I have some beautiful pansies in my pansy holding bed. We’re not going to be touching those for today. We’re really going to focus on the area behind me and that is my main walkway and we’re only going to focus on one side of the walkway bed. The other side of the walkway bed will be tackled on a different day. Let me turn the camera around and I’m going to show you what we’re going to start with. I have general weeding to do in the crevice there. And then when my small leaf roodendrin stopped blooming, they dropped all their petals. So, I just need to blow all that debris off. Up along the walkway there are weeds, but then there are a lot of just random seedlings. So, I’ll be coming through here and either digging things up and potting them up. For example, this little guy right here. It’s very sweet and cute. It’s a bianial and it’s called the English lawn daisy. I’m either going to pot it up or I’m going to move it somewhere else in my yard, but I don’t want it here just because I have random seedlings of it everywhere. There are also a whole bunch of seedlings of bloodroot. I love bloodroot. And what I’ll just do is dig up each of the little seedlings of bloodroot. And what I’m going to do is just tuck them in at the base of the larger, more mature plants, which are right there. And you can see I’ve done that before. There are a whole bunch of other little tiny small plants there. I’ll just tuck them with their friends. I have a spurge or a euphoria seedling here. I’m also going to just be weeding that out because I have that in other places of my yard. More weeding, which are just these little seedlings of I think maple trees. And then I have my pansy holding bed nearby. And I’m going to be weeding all these little pansy seedlings out just because I don’t need them. I have a whole bunch of pansies very close by. Doesn’t that look so beautiful? And so there’s no need for me to keep any seedlings of pansies in this flower bed or at least in this section of the flower bed. After you’ve been gardening for a while, you get to know what’s a weed and what’s a seedling. This is a seedling of great blue loilia. I’ll just be digging that up and tucking that into a pot of other great blue loilia plants that I have in my plant nursery. Random weeds. More random weeds. A lot more of the very sweet and cute English daisy. And you get the idea. It’s really the same thing as we continue on in this bed. Now, there is a beautiful coline seedling that’s in this flower bed. It really is a misplaced. It shouldn’t be here. So, I will be digging that out and putting it somewhere else in my yard. More English lawn daisy. More of the great blue loilia. I do want to mention in this flower bed, I have a couple of plants that I’m going to be cutting back at a later date. There is the grape blue loilia and then there’s the muscari or grape hyasin. Both of these plants will basically go dormant, but they’re waiting. It’s still been quite cool. So, I don’t want to cut them back yet because I want the plants to continue feeding the bulbs and give energy for next year. Once they start dying back, turning yellow on a different date. I’ll be coming in here and cutting all of these back because I have many of these plants in this flower bed. And I’m just going to be planting a lot of my annuals around them knowing that at a different date I will be cutting these guys back. I have a ton of loop and seedlings all over in this area and that includes in this particular flower bed. I will be digging them up and I’m going to try to take as much of their root as I can when I dig them up. And the reason is lupin do not like to have their roots disturbed. So I need to be really careful when I do that. But I just don’t want them in this main walkway flower bed. So there are a lot of loopin seedlings that need to be removed. And my plan for them is to just pot them up. And I hope to sell them next year as part of my plant nursery. And I’m not joking when I say that there are a lot of loopin seedlings in here. There really are so many loopin seedlings. It’s not a bad problem to have, but in the case of this flower bed, they’re a little too much. I love to save every single plant I can possibly save. But then there’s reality. Time is of the essence. And it’s not possible to save every plant. These are seedlings and they’re beautiful seedlings of pansies, but I just can’t save them. I I really don’t have time. And since my pansy holding bed is already so full, it’s okay for me at this point to be removing all these seedlings. The same is true for seedlings such as the Rebecca or Blackeyed Susan. Trust me, I love these plants. I love every plant. Um, but I just I don’t have the time, unfortunately, to put up all of these plants. I have so many annuals that I still need to get in the ground. So, at this point, I have to pick and choose what I’m doing in my yard. And the reason I’m telling you this is you might be in the same boat. Maybe you’re feeling overwhelmed and you’re not sure how to prioritize. So, I could do the same with these guys with the bloodroot, but I know that I love bloodroot in my yard. I have so many shady areas in my yard that I could fill with bloodroot that I feel bad getting rid of the bloodroot. It’s a perennial and it does great in the shade, especially in a woodland garden. I love it and I know a lot of other people love it as well. So, for that reason, it stays. I’m not going to get rid of it. And when you have little seedlings like this, the reality is these plants are not going to bloom for you for another year or two. So that’s the reason why I’m just tucking them in here. It’s not worthwhile for me to pot them up because I have so many of the parent plants nearby. If I didn’t have any parent plants nearby, just little baby seedlings, then I would be potting them up. You can tell that the sun is out. It’s very bright today. So, when it comes to digging up any plants like this English lawn daisy, I’m going to be putting it in a container. This container. And it’s just like a type of shoe box or whatever. I’m not sure, a little tote. And you can see I put some compost in here. And I’m going to be tucking them in here. Now, this does not have drainage holes in it. My plan is to put the plants in here, give them a drink of water. This is going to get placed in my shed, which is covered. It’s in the shade. And within the next week, whenever I have time, I can go ahead and start pricking out any plants that are in here and then potting them up. And I am planning to sell some of these because people do like this type of plant, even though it’s a bianial. But then also, I can save some for myself and put them out in my landscapes at a different time. Now, if I knew where I wanted to put this in my landscape, I would do it right now. But I’m quite I’m not quite sure right now. That’s the reason why I’m not transplanting it into my landscape. And instead, I’m just going to tuck it in right in here. And then I’m going to place this right behind me where it’s a little bit shadier. I don’t want this sitting out in the sun and baking. When it comes to my summer annuals, I would say this is one of the weediest flower beds that I have. And remember, when I’m using the word weedy, weedy can mean perennials that self- sew readily. things like pansies or the bloodroot, all the plants that I already showed you, they are in places where they should not be. And just like any flower bed, more weeds will appear, but that’s okay. I want it to be a fairly clean slate before I start planting my annuals today. Speaking of annuals, I’m not even sure what annuals I’m going to plant in this space. I know I’m definitely going to plant these snapdragons that I started from seed. I may even plant the Gonfrina. It It really needs to be a plant that likes sun because this is a sunny area of my yard. Well, I’ve shown you some of the basic things that I’m doing. Any of the bloodroot, I’m tucking in near parent plants. Any weeds, I’m pulling out. Any English lawn daisy that I find, I’m tucking into this box. Let me continue with that same process. And when I find a new plant to show you, we’ll go over that next. And before I turn the camera off, I think it’s worthwhile for me to just do a close-up shot of what this area looks like. And I would say most of the weeds, let’s call them weeds, are usually towards the walkway, not as much towards the center of the bed, but there are some. And as I tackle them, I will be cleaning those as well. So, I just want to show you generally speaking how this looks. And that way in the end we can do a walkth through again and I can show you how it looks after we’ve tackled everything. And it’s actually quite a bit of space to cover. Even though this is a long narrow bed, there’s a lot of space to cover here. Okay, I’ll be back. If you can believe it, three weeks have now passed since I filmed that part of the video. The scope of the project drastically changed and I want to tell you a little bit about it. I did all the general weeding. I was able to dig up all the plants that I talked about and not only that, I was able to pot them up and bring them down to my plant nursery. I didn’t quite get to the loop and it seemed a little overwhelming, but I started looking at the other side of my walkway and I said, “No, now is the time for me to move those roodendrrons that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have three roodendrrons that are on the right hand side of the walkway. They are way too big for that space. You know how it is sometimes. You buy a plant, you don’t read the tag, you plunk it in your landscape, and you realize very quickly, oh no, it’s too big for where I put it. That was the case of those roodendrrons. And since it’s still springtime, the weather has still been cool, it’s been very wet, we’ve had a number of weeks of rain, I figured I should really do this right now. So, the scope of the project changed a lot. Let me show you what we ended up doing. Along the walkway in the front of my house are three small leaf rooed endrins. They are Olga as well as PJM. My husband will be using his tractor to transplant them. We have already pre-dug three holes where they’re going to go. They’re getting moved to the north side of our house. It’s an area that’s behind an existing flower bed. In each of the planting holes, I sprinkled biotone starter fertilizer. And I also put water in each of those holes just to make the transition for the roodendrrons a little easier on them. I’m pointing out two of the three roodendrrons that have already been moved here. Using the tractor made the job a lot easier for us. This is a before shot of what the space looked like before the roodendrrons were added. And here’s an after shot of the roodendrrons in their new home. We also transplanted a red bud from a different place in my garden where it was not thriving. I’m hopeful it will do better in the new location. Who would have thought there was a window behind those three roeded ends. This is what the space now looks like. We cleaned up the area, added some of my homemade compost, and then fixed the irrigation lines. We also blew off any debris along the walkway. The next area that I tackled was right near the pond. I have some beautiful pennials in there, but they’re being overtaken by Queen Anne’s lace. The first thing I did was weed the front of that area where it’s mostly weeds, but then there’s also that beautiful white perennial, which is the English lawn daisy. In an effort to get rid of the weed that is taking over the area around my pond, I decided to move or transplant the perennials that are in that space. So my plan was to transplant the perennials that were near the pond just over to the new space where the roodendrrons used to be. The perennials that I’m transplanting are a type of car as well as a type of hooka. The plants should do well in their new location since they thrived around the pond. As I transplanted each piece, I made sure that none of the queen ans lace was coming along with them. But you never know if I end up finding a small piece of the Queen Anne’s lace in the new space, I’m going to have to remove it immediately. Tell me, do you have a plant like Queen Anne’s lace that has taken over a flower bed? And if so, what have you done to get rid of a weed like that? Do you try to just let it take over or do you try to remove it? Queen Anslace is very pretty. I love the foliage on it. The flowers are even beautiful. I just don’t like it in this formal space. I thought the pattern was going to be very pretty, alternating between the hookra as well as the carrots. In each of the planting holes, I made sure to add some water. And then after planting each of the plants, I gave them more water. It was a warm day and the sun was out. I wanted to ensure that each plant was okay during the transplant. Since drip irrigation is in this bed, the plants will be getting water on a daily basis. The next thing I did was dig up a hosta that’s in the center of that area. It’s a hosta I don’t have anywhere else in my yard, and I thought it would also look pretty in this new space. Since the Queen Anne’s lace is very close to the hosta, I had to be sure that I didn’t bring over any of its roots. I think the color combination of all these plants will look so pretty in this new area. I then went to the north side of my house where we transplanted those rodendrrons and I basically shopped my garden. I started digging out some beautiful larger leaf blue colored hosta. I thought those would look beautiful in this new area. When it comes to landscaping a garden space, three main colors that you want to have are red, yellow, and blue. We’re definitely getting the red from the hookah. The yellow is coming from the carrots, but the hosta that’s in the center there also has a little bit of yellow on the leaves. And then we’re bringing in the blue with these hosta that we’re adding to this space. I always like starting with small pieces of plants. Even though it’s nice to get instant gratification, there’s also something to be said about shopping your own space, doing things on a budget, and knowing that within a few years, this whole space will easily fill in. And this is what the area looks like now that everything’s been planted. The only thing left to do is to add a nice layer of mulch. A perennial that I loved, but I did not love in this space was Jacob’s ladder. So, I’ve decided to remove it. And I’ll put it somewhere else in my yard. I’m not sure where. So, for right now, I’m just going to dig it up and pot it up. Again, as I was removing the Jacob’s ladder, I made sure that there were no roots of the Queen Anne’s lace coming along with the plant. And finally, it was time to tackle the beast. I was very careful to try to remove as much of the root as possible. My plan for this year is to stay on top of the Queen Anne’s lace. In other words, I’m removing as much of the plant as I possibly can, but I have to be realistic. I know that more of the plant is going to come back. It’s very important to not add this plant to my compost pile. The best thing to do with a plant like this is to throw it away in your trash. For this year, I’m planning to put potted plants in this area. And then as I see more of the queen ants lace appearing, I’m going to try removing it. In the fall, if I need to, I’ll come in with something that I can spray on the leaves to help me with killing this plant off. As much as I loved the color that the rodendrrons brought to my spring garden up along the front walkway, in reality they were way too big to be placed right at the foundation of my house. One of my gardening goals during the last few years has been to make my front walkway a little more formal and a little less wild. And for me at this point in my life, I just want to go back to a little more simple of a look. Next up will be cleaning around the pond and getting my pond working again. The moral of the story is if there’s something in your yard that you don’t love, don’t live with it. Life is too short. Make the changes that you want to make. If you can’t make them today, think about making them tomorrow. If you can’t make them tomorrow, plan it out and see when can you make those changes. If you’re working on a project and the scope of the project changes, that is okay as well. I am so happy we got all of this work done along the walkway. As much as I love the snapdragons, the colus, and the loilia that I was able to plant up along the walkway, I think it’s time that Gonfrina needs to go in next. So, be on the lookout for that in a future garden tour. I hope this video inspired you and gave you some ideas for your own space. If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you. Please drop them down below. And until the next video, make it a great day with gardening.