Gardening woes

My thumb is not green.  Up to this point in my life, it's been more of a grey-ish black.  So moving into our home this year that was a short sale and vacant for nine months then piling a summer drought on top of it is not faring well with my yardwork skills. 

When we moved in, our yard was pretty dead since no one had been taking care of it for almost a year.  Turns out that our house is also one of the very few on our street that has Bermuda grass as opposed to the St. Augustine grass everyone around us has that grows abundantly and beautifully.  Apparently Bermuda grass does not like neglect nor droughts.

Since we've owned the house now about nine months ourselves, we've spent most of our yardwork labor on just cleaning up the yard.  We cannot seem to get past the weeds, overgrown plants, dead spots and now clovers that seem to have taken over our front yard.  I'm trying to not get disheartened about the whole learning process that seems to be yardwork and gardening, but every time I go out to try to beautify our yard, I spend all of my time weeding.  I feel that all I've done in the last nine months might as well have been nothing because I can't get past all of the weeds!  We have so much more to do outside of weeding, but it seems we'll never have a chance to get to that point because we can't seem to lessen the amount of weeds we have.

It wouldn't be a huge deal if all the houses around us didn't have immaculate yards.  Alas, they do!  We're not even trying to keep up with them; we're just trying to have a cleaned-up yard.

We're so grateful to have had some friends, Lauri and Ed Check, come over to the house and walk around with me to give me some tips.  I really have no idea what I'm doing sometimes, so they provided a lot of direction.  I definitely need to invest in a "Gardening for Dummies" book or gardening classes -- something.

We did do one fun thing Sunday -- plant a sago palm in a pretty planter on our front porch.  I love sago palms!  I actually just love palms in general, and we're hoping to plant a regular palm tree in our backyard when we have to pull up one dead tree that's already there.  We already had one sago palm in the backyard -- the prettiest plant or landscaping piece we have right now!  I really wanted one in the front yard, but there was nowhere to really plant it at this time, so we headed up to Lowe's and found a nice little planter.  Thanks to Mark, it's already by our front door to greet visitors!

Here are some photos of the yard we had taken to first show the Checks what it looked like before they came over.

 

 

 

 

 

Ugh, this one is the bain of my yardwork.  It's so overgrown and it's hardly been touched.  I'm scared to get back there.

I'm trying to keep my chin up and not compare ourselves to our neighbors tooooo much.  Part of me would rather just pay someone to clean it all up then we can just maintain it.  Alas, my husband feels much more satisfaction from accomplishing the work ourselves.  Hm.

Baby steps, right?