Front Yard Landscaping

Background

Customer wanted to update the look on her front yard. She requested that I perform the work. The initial discussion was about replacing a shrub, but expanded into doing more.

As you can see, couple of the bushes had died and had been overtaken by weeds and grass. Per the conversation with the customer, a lawn care company (I am not going to mention the name) sprayed something on the bushes that was supposed to help them, but instead resulted in some of them dying.

In addition, grass had started to grow up inside of the bed. Customer had used plastic bags as a weed barrier when she initially set up the bed. Also the lawn care professional that the customer uses, would sometimes cut too close to the bed. As a result, some of the rocks would be launched into the yard, sidewalk, or other location that they should not be.

I suggested that brick pavers be used as a barrier to prevent this from happening going forward as nobody would be willing to run over bricks with a lawn mower as it could potentially destroy the mower. For the weed control, I recommended that landscape fabric be put down to prevent or hinder future weeds from growing, and using more lava rock as a mulch for the bed.

Materials Used

Materials used for this project were:

• Brick pavers
• Lava rock
• Landscape fabric
• one bush/shrub

Remove Old Landscaping

The old landscaping was removed. This included a combination of leaves, lava rock, and the black plastic weed barrier. The plan was that the lava rock be separated from the other materials in the bed. However, that proved to be a bit more difficult in execution.

The existing rock, leaves, and weeds were raked, shoveled, and placed onto a tarp. In addition, the dead bushes were removed. One of the bushes was replaced with a new one.

Install New Landscaping

Before the landscape fabric was installed, all purpose fertizilzer was used to help the existing and new plants. The living shrubs were left in place. Since they were left, the landscape fabric was installed and cut to fit around the existing bushes. This would allow for the greatest amount of coverage to prevent weeds and grass from showing up in the beds.

The old landscaping was removed and placed on the tarp. As you can see from the picture above, the rocks were used to keep the fabric from blowing away, granted there was much wind during the project.

Lock In The Pavers

Each over the pavers were placed on a layer of fast setting concrete. This will help hold the pavers in place. Since the ground is mostly level, leveling the bricks did not take too much effort.

In some areas, the ground was slightly higher. Those areas, were dug down using a shovel and pickaxe. Then the dirt was compacted down using a tamper to make sure it did not settle once the brick was placed on top of it. Once the pavers were in place, they were watered so that the concrete could set up. Because the concrete is directly on the ground, the concrete will soak up water from the ground, in addition to the rain water.

I got the idea for the no dig border from watching a YouTube video. As I mentioned, I did have to do some digging in order to get the bricks as level as possible. In some spots, getting them level was not possbile as the ground sloped downward (for drainage).

Conclusion

In the end the lava rock was added and below is the final outcome of the project.

As you can see, the landscape has been cleaned up. In addition, the weeds were removed, and the customer should no longer have issues with rocks in the yard after the grass is cut.