Front yard planting

Wow, we make even more progress on one of our many projects!  And it has been a cool and breezy couple of days, perfect for planting and trimming our plants.  My foot is strong enough to walk on, so we got started going through the plants we've acquired over the past year to find the ones we want to put in our front yard.  As a reminder, this is where we were in May, after we sprayed the yard with Round-up:

 
We paid a couple of guys to use a sod cutter and haul away the dead grass.  It was worth the 300 bucks.  Then I rototilled the yard, twice.  Raked and raked and pulled roots, and sprayed any green sprigs that poked up with Round-up.  Then we laid the front walkway, after digging a pile of dirt out and then adding base, pavers and gravel.

 Then we picked up some boulders from craigslist (our favorite place to 'shop'), and raked and raked and raked some more.  And then finally, yesterday we planted!

Yesterday, we put in the big agaves and arranged the boulders to show them off, then today we picked up the groundcover and the dwarf bottlebrush that we needed to get.  We still need two dwarf kangaroo paws (we saw them EVERYWHERE a month ago - we've been to 4 stores and none to be found right now).  We also went this morning to pick up a load of free mulch through the LB sanitation dept.  We can have it delivered for free, but we like to look through and get the best kind.  So now it looks like this:

 We added in a few annuals (some alyssum, dianthus and lobelia) for color and because it needs some thing to fill in while the groundcover grows in.  It'll get crowded later, and we can remove things.  I am not afraid to move plants around all over the place.

all the agaves I got free on craigslist.  The big blue agave americana (looks weird in this shot) is a beauty, he's huge and in great shape.  The little artichoke agaves (agave parryi) are really lovely - I have about 8-9 of those here and there.  And off to the right is the agave bovicornuta (cow horn agave) that's Dale's favorite.  I think we still have a couple of bent leaves to trim on some of these, but we went over each one and cleaned them up, trimmed the dead or cracked leaves, and they look great.

Yea, he's got one flipper off to the side that can go.  Sorry about the blurry photo. We added some Mexican feather grass here, although we are really wary of that because it can be really invasive here, so we have to really keep up on that.   So this part looks great, but meanwhile, the rest of the front.....

yea, it's still a big pile of dirt and rocks.  And a heap of roots to throw away.  Not to mention the "hell strip" - which is a mass of weeds and overgrown candy apple (dorotheanthus bellidiformis), which grows like a maniac.  I think I planted like 5 little starts here, and it's OOC.

What a mess!  I think tomorrow I'm going to pull all this up, and put it in the center section (around the base of the tree) and rescue all the succulents that are buried there.  We aren't planning on doing anything with the parking strip here for a bit, but I can at least rake the dirt smooth and get this eyesore taken care of.  I do have a nice purple fountain grass and several other agaves buried in this mess.  But for now, it's just nice to have one section of the front that looks great when we drive up!