Advice from the Owner

We love that we do not have to water or mow a front lawn that was not really being "used". It was only for looks and sucking up drop after drop of water. This front yard is full sun. The grass was nearly impossible to keep green during the summer. Plus, I love all of the garden in a box colors we now have. When we purchased the home 4 years ago, there was grass to the curb. Each year we have planned to remove more grass. It was a phased approach. This allowed us to consider the way were moving around the yard and allowed our garden in the box plantings a year to mature. One major success came this year when we finally removed the final grass. We moved dirt around the yard to create berms and then installed the dry creek bed. As we had already somewhat mature plantings from the years past, it was not overly shocking to remove the last portion of the lawn. The established plants carry the yard so that it does not all look to be immature plantings. We are very pleased. We are currently transitioning our spray sprinklers to a drip system. We had the sprinkler project estimated ($3000) but then turned to YouTube and Ewing's Irrigation expert support. It turns out we can do this ourselves for less than a quarter of the cost. We use the City of Fort Collins free mulch days to mulch all fo the beds and did bring in the grey breeze rock from Ewing's landscape supply. The creek is made up of donated rocks that our neighbors were giving away. So many win-wins. We simply love it.