Birthday Gardening :)

My mom and dad gave me two of these cool self-watering flower boxes for my birthday!  I waited for my mom to get into town to go shopping for flowers and to plant in the boxes--she really enjoys gardening, and is pretty good at it too!  We went to Lowe's and picked out flowers, along with some hanging baskets to finish up our landscaping in the front flower bed.  Jackson was an excellent helper in planting the flowers :)

He really liked choosing which flowers to go next.

Getting the flowers out of their holder.

Jackson was equally excited to help Daddy water the flowers since it meant using the hose!

The finished front box.  It is hanging off of the railing on the side of the porch.

An outside view.

The second box is hanging off of the side of the deck.

Our finished front yard all spruced up!  The builder landscaped for us before we moved in, but after living here for a year we wanted to change a few things up.  We swapped out two junipers that flanked the whole house.  They relocated to the back of the side yard on the right side of the house near the basement stairs.  We planted a forsythia bush instead on the left side up front and a butterfly bush on the right side up front.  We left the boxwoods alone.  We kept two azaleas (the healthiest ones since they weren't doing well, overall), and moved the two, seemingly dead ones to the back side yard by the junipers.  These were all things we were crazy about, but we couldn't bear to throw them out.  We just hid them a little...  We added two guacamole hosta and two purple salvia to the front.  The hanging baskets give a little height to the whole area, and we called it done!  I am REALLY pleased with what we decided on and am so grateful to all the manual labor Josh put in planting and re-planting things!  Thanks to him and Mom, I smile even bigger each time I pull up to the house :)