It's the clipped lollypop standards that just don't seem right in the application here. I think they'd be be more effective as focal points to design garden beds around somewhere other than in the front yard - like one would design gardens around a fountain, statue or other garden art. How do you feel about low maintenance succulents between the walk and porch; one of the grasses as an accent? Something I'd love, but can't have much in the way of in my climate. As for additional shrubs under the window like a row of boxwood - that might get to look ordinary and tiresome, especially if mercilessly sheared. There are always two schools of thought regarding foundation planting on this forum - some like it, some don't. I have the "usual" foundation plantings, mirror image arborvitae, mugos, and yews. My house is a center hall colonial so that arrangement worked. It's lived far beyond its usefulness now - 40 years and I can no longer keep it in check, so it'll be ripped out and I'll have to face the replacement dilemma myself.

If this were my yard, my sequence of events would probably be the following. I phrase it as "do this", but that's just because typing, "If it were me, I'd do this" gets rather repetitive after a while. :) I'd also recommend trying to find an organic landscaper who'd be willing to let you pay him for a few hours just to look over the place and make some recomemndations. Maybe you'll hire him to do some or all of the work, maybe that's not in the budget, but it would still be good to get a professional opinion, rather than discovering three years from now that you didn't think of something that has cost you a ton of work. That said, my thoughts are: - Pick a spot for a food garden (Recommendations: Full sun, and near the back door, though not so near that it'll get trampled when you fix the slab problem.) and get it started, while you're working on the other things below. If there's any money left after considering all the spending I'm recommending below :), hire someone to put in two to four framed raised beds with nice high sides to maximize the soil depth smothering the grass/weeds, each bed perhaps eight feet long by four feet wide, with nice wide paths (absolute minimum two feet; three or four is better) between them and around the whole thing, the paths landscape-fabriced and fine-ground-bark-mulched, the whole thing boxed in with a weed barrier or, even more extravagantly, a flat strip of paving stones that you can run a mower over. Have some good soil delivered, buy some compost and manure, mix it all up, lay drippers for watering, and get started planting. (Remember - NO TREATED WOOD FOR RAISED BEDS!) If there isn't money for this lavish option or you don't want to commit a big bag of money to a permanent location while you're still laying out the lot, instead use one of the many techniques for "smothering" the ground. Still use beds, even though they won't be boxed, still make a nice wide path and a surrounding path, also smothered but not with bark because it'll get into the beds, and still confine the first garden to two to four four-by-eight beds. (You can of course till and amend; I'm suggesting smothering because even if you till you're probably going to have to smother the ground _anyway_; it will be packed with weed seeds and possibly grass roots. But you could till, amend with compost and add some slow-release fertilizer, and then smother, and then you'll have the compost and fertilizer working for you and when you cut through whatever you're smothering with in order to plant, the soil will initially be soft.) If you absolutely can't bear to restrain yourself from planting a bigger garden ("The landscaper's already _here_, after all! Are we really going to pay to have him come again next year?"), I'd recommend keeping the extra beds unplanted and covered in landscape fabric or weed paper or newspaper until you've experienced a few weeks of keeping two to four beds weeded. And in fact, even in the beds you're working you might want to use weed paper or even landscape fabric, this first year, to minimize the weeding load. By the way, if anyone in your household has a rather short reach, you might want to make the beds three feet wide instead. The eight feet long is arbitrary - the length should logically be based on the standard lengths for the framing material for framed beds. For unframed beds, you could theoretically make the beds infinitely long but if they're longer than ten feet I will just about guarantee you that you'll find yourself stepping in them instead of walking around them. If you're thinking that you'll just step _over_ the beds, remember that late in the summer they may be a five-foot-high solid mass of tomato foliage. I think it's perfectly possible to prep a couple of beds in time for a warm-weather garden. You'll have to buy tomato transplants and other things that take a long time to go from seed to seedling, but corn and cucumber and bean seeds don't go in until well into May, at least in my area. And then there's the fall garden afterwards. - Meanwhile, get a contractor or a landscaper who does hardscape (and is appropriately licensed and knowledgeable about structural and drainage issues) in to look at the slab and height problem and make a proposal. Maybe get a couple so you have a couple of proposals to choose from. As someone else said, I would be wary of bringing in a lot of soil and possibly changing the drainage profile of the property. I'd be thinking of something more like a step or steps, or a retaining wall with steps - I'm not quite visualizing the situation. Then either hire the person to do the work, or file the proposal away and make your other decisions based on the fact that you'll be doing it when you can afford it. - Hire someone to take out the yucca/trees/stumps, the boulders, the rotting wood, whatever part of the weird slab height thing the contractor wants gone, and so on. (If debating about the slab solution takes a while, you could still hire someone to do the rest of the cleanup.) - Weedwhack and yank huge weeds and move large rocks that block a mower - or hire someone to do so - until most or all of the space is mowable, and then keep it mowed so that the huge unmowable weeds can't come back. I realize that it's not grass, but mowing is still often an adequate way to temporarily control weeds, and actually _killing_ the weeds is likely to be a long-term task, one that you don't want to set as your first task because it might be unfinished ten years later. :) - At this point, again if I were you, I would not put in a lot of grass. You'll have a food garden, you'll have the jungle suppressed with regular mowing, and now, IMO, it will be time to get to know the property, and the weeds, a little better before you pick a place to put in more lawn. (And you'll be learning what your water bills look like. Grass is thirsty.) At my house, we have a fraction of the amount of space that you have, and we still have flower and shrub borders several feet deep surrounding two modest lawns. (I'd still like to take out half the existing lawn space, but The Guy objects. :)) There are a bazillion non-lawn options. You could put in a mini-orchard of fruit trees with mowable clover underfoot. A berry hedge. An herb garden. A perennial or annual cutting garden. An asparagus bed. A bulb garden covered in some low-care ground cover. A mixed perennial border. A bigger vegetable garden space for corn and pumpkins and other big crops or if you want to dryfarm. (Dryfarming involves growing vegetables with little to no water, much wider spacing, and meticulous weed control.) Even if you decide that all you want to work is a modest food garden, your water bills might convince you to fill the rest of the space with something other than grass - and once grass is in, it's a nightmare to get out. Hours to scuff the ground and sprinkle seed, but possibly years of regret afterward. So I'd suggest that you _maybe_ put in a modest lawn near the back door if the existing lawn space that you mention is in the wrong place, and just keep mowing down the weeds for a while as you think about your next options.

G'Day! For lawn info, i'd start by reading past postings at: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/lawns/ the lawn care forum. i noticed you list tractors as a favorite topic. Depending on what land you have besides the lawn, you may want to use a tractor-pulled mower, like we use for our pastures. If so, draw the edges of your garden beds and such to suit the curves your tractor and mower can fit. If not, with under an acre to cut, and flat at that, you really could do it with a reel mower - the old fasioned mowers you used to be able to hire a local teenager to do the lawn with for $10--. You'll probably end up with a power mower and an edger/weedeater/weedwhip. If you can, edge your flower beds and such with bricks laid side by side, not end to end; this will provide a wide enough margine you can mow right along and not worry about massacaring the "floppage" (overhanging part of plants.) You may also want to wrap the base of small trees with trunk tape before you accidently scar the bark. A ring of mulch provides a nice mowing-safety margin for trees too, but don't build a "volcano;" mulch should be only 1/2" next to the trunch base, thickening to 1" a foot away and 2" two foot away. Mulch too thick right be the trunck can rot the trunck bark above the root line (trunk and root barks are very different), and shelters wee critters than nibble bark in winter. 'Fraid i know nothing about caring for lawns exept to be sure to get the roots of any weeds. A lot of folk around here disapprove of chemlawn. All that stuff that gets sprayed goes in to the water table, and we who don't live in town pump it back up from our wells. Not so great for folk or our livestock. A perfect lawn is a very unnatural environment. Sure you don't want ot rip the whole thing up and make it all into garden? To each his own. You've got a couple month left to plan. Have fun! -vlad Here is a link that might be useful: GardenWeb Lawn Care Forum

The hostas are going to overlap your walkway and make it look even narrower. You should have listened to your wife. (Is there an echo in this thread LOL?) In addition to not looking good from a design standpoint, the little beds that you have put in are a real pain to trim around when you're mowing. And if they don't have neatly trimmed edges they don't look good no matter what is growing in them. I would also take out the bed around the lamp post and just grass up to it. Focus on the house for the landscaping.