What Do You Do When Your Husband Turns 40?

I guess if you're me, you try to kill him with extreme yard work.  Poor Richard...  I really gave us both a workout today with landscaping the back of the house.  

Earlier this week I took advantage of a sale at Dayton's Garden Center.  If you buy more than 10 azaleas, they were half off ($3.99 each!).  So I picked up 12 of them, intending on landscaping the back of the house since it is so dull.  Unfortunately, we needed to pull up A LOT of sod to make this happen.  Here are the before and after photos...

Along the back of the house we basically had grass, weeds, and a few hostas around the window wells.  

We had very little color going on:

Since the plants are pretty small right now, they haven't made much of a difference, but they'll get bigger.  I moved a butterfly bush from the front of the house to under the kitchen window.

Next on the project list... Moving the pile of dirt and shavings from the ground up oak tree stump around the house.  The shavings will be good around the azaleas and blueberries, which will like the additional acidic mulch.

Well, it's good to know that we were able to get as much done as we did on such a nice (but a little too sunny) day.  I'm pretty sure Richard is happy to go back to work tomorrow and leave the yard behind!