Why Can't The Yard Just Stay Pretty???

  

We work really hard every spring to get our yard looking nice.  We pretty much let it rest during the winter months.  We don't have snow here, but we do have frost and some freezing temps.  Back in early March we cleaned up the yard and flower beds and filled the planters with beautiful spring flowers.  I took all of these pictures then and posted them to my facebook page, so you may have already seen them.

 

                     Clean flower bed!

I painted the front door because I fell in love with the door color on the cover of Southern Living Magazine's March issue! It's called Quarry by Pratt and Lambert. I took the magazine to Home Depot and the paint guy brought the color up on the computer and made it for me. My hero! The bucket on the front door is an old one that had a paper label on it at one time. I painted it white and added Le Fleurs which I learned should have been Les Fleurs! I added the "s" but didn't re-shoot the picture. (I'm lazy like that sometimes.) 




I added an old little wooden chair with bits of aqua paint still showing and a couple of porcelain bunnies from Pier One Imports for fun.

I sanded, took apart and painted the bench which has been sitting in front of our house for years.

 
It must have gotten this bad looking overnight!  Surely I wouldn't let something like this sit beside our front door!!!

  
                                                                     That's better!

We live in the deep southeast of the United States along the coast of Georgia.  We have Live Oak trees in our yard.  Live Oaks keep their leaves all winter, which is nice.  But in spring they start shedding and replacing leaves.  Not so nice!  The shedding is called "weeping".  I think that's because it makes people want to weep since they do this until mid to late May!  After several weeks of either being out of town or deluged with rain, we finally worked in our front yard yesterday.  It was a mess!  The Live Oaks have the yard looking like late fall, except we have tall green grass!  The planters of flowers look kind of bleak due to no water for two weeks while I was out of town, then tropical storm Debby brought torrents of rain!  The flower beds I had painstakingly cleaned in March looked like jungles again.  We have briar vines, dollar weed and every other weed known to earth!  I weeded one flower bed, but the other two will have to wait a little longer.  I am tired!  Maybe in a few days it will look like these pics again....minus the spring flowers, of course!