Garden Time Approaches

 This is a tiny example of the non-grass we have in our front yard. Yuck. I want it all to go and then we can start over again from scratch. The shrub is staying however, as it is a gorgeous (I hope) pink Magnolia, which I have wanted all my gardening life. Yay! Still it needs tending and pruning and it will have more glory days to come. The whole front yard will have to be done over, removing the horrid Bermuda grass that is there and replacing it with plantings to make it a lovely garden. The plan keeps evolving in my mind, and we'll see how it transpires, here on the blog in weeks to come.

Part of my plan for the front yard is to have a ground level deck built because this house does not have a front porch. We have had a front porch in every house but one since we moved to Tennessee and so that has to happen here. This photo I found on Pinterest gives you the idea, altho I want mine painted light gray rather than stained. 

While gathering ideas, I saw this example, also on Pinterest:

and that reminded me of our deck in our first house up on the mountain in Palmer TN. I looked up old pics of this deck and here is a bird's eye view.

 Dave and his pal Mike built this on the slope along our pathway and it was glorious. Especially nice was the built in flower boxes all along three sides. The plants really enhanced the use of the deck and we loved seeing them grow all season long, safe from the moles, voles and chipmunks which were eating themselves silly in the other parts of the garden.

The initial plantings look so innocent, but the sweet potato vines got ENORMOUS and cascaded down off the deck into the walkway and overtook everything. I loved it. 

So now I am going to ask my deck builder people to make a deck like this again for me. Why not? You only live once!