Jake and I have been working our bootie off in the yard these last past 3 years. Our project this summer has been to get plants around the pond so we can stop fighting the never ending weed festival that is our back yard. Come rain, shine, or snow, we've been out there every weekend putting in long hard hours & watching our project come to life.
Where we started
A yard full of weeds that had to be hand pulled to avoid poisening the pond.
It looks like a weird pile of rocks, but I swear there's a rock garden & waterfall in there.
My favorite part of hand pulling all of this, is by the time you're finished it all, it's already grown back. Thank goodness for pre-emergent. I wish I would have learned about that one years ago.
Finally! Weeds are out, we're ready to plant. Here's the before.
Here's the after. We still need more rocks on the pond & I can't wait to put more plants in the rock garden itself, but I'm so pleased with our hard work.
Here's what we put in. 
3 Columnar Norway Spruce. They will grow about 30 feet & get about 10 feet wide.
The grass plants right in front are Siberian Iris. We put in 11 of them.
1 variagated willow on stadard. I really love trees on standard. The shorter grasses are maiden grass that will grow tall.
Behind the pond we put 5 ninebarks & 2 blue willows. We're hoping to make a descent plant fence to keep our neighbors out of view.
In front we put 5 thom thumb cottoneasters & 3 blue grasses.
4 of watever these plants are. Forensyth gold or something like that.
The most challenging part was the ground cover. We put in 128 individual plants. It will look really cool in about 3 years. In the spring the ground will bloom purple & yellow and in the summer it will bloom red and pink.
Purple ice plant
Red creeping thyme
Woolly thyme
Yellow ice plant
After cleaning the pond out last year, I discovered the entire bottom of the pond was full of river pebbles. This makes cleaning the pond difficult, so I pulled all of the rocks out. If you blow this pic up you can see that I used the rocks to fill in the spaces between the flagstone. I love the way it turned out. You can also see that I built a path that walks you up to the garden.
Here's what we pulled out.
Rocks! Rocks, rocks, & more rocks. If you ever landscape with rocks, do yourself a huge favor & put landscaping tarp underneath the rocks or they just sink into the dirt & are IMPOSSIBLE to get out. Better yet, DON'T USE ROCKS.
More rocks. We have huge piles all over the yard. What an eye soar.
Oh ya. And here's a pile of bricks, cinderblocks, & MORE ROCKS that we pulled out from behind the pond.
This was the worst area to clean up out of all of it. There was a layer of 2 inches of dirt that had settled on top of a layer of 2-3 inches of rocks. Under that, we found 2 more inches of dirt on top of a layer of landscaping tarp. We got all of that cleaned up just in time for jake to discover a final layer of a red brick pathway line with MORE ROCKS, all on top of a plastic liner. It's no wonder that the lilac bushes that were planted back there never grew. Took us forever to pull all of that out.
We still have a ton of work to do. The area just to the left of the pond is a mile high in weeds. It kind of ruins all of the work we've done. But if you turn your head just right & block it out, it looks pretty good & I'm really proud of our hard work. Now if I could only get a fence & block out that nasty blue shed.
