We Hired a Landscaping Crew

And they're all losing their hair.

Last fall, John and I set the goal of making the yard around our house beautiful. While that doesn’t seem like an outrageous goal, when you live in an area that’s blistering hot all summer and covered by snow the other half of the year, finding plants hardy enough to just survive can be a challenge.

What to Plant?

I started researching in winter when the snow was still on the ground. I choose a number of drought-tolerant plants that could also tolerate extreme cold (-20F) and then I started to narrow my list based on what I could find at local nurseries. The difference between what grows at 1,000ft and what grows at our 3,500ft elevation is vast.

Finally, I settled on Russian sage, red feather reed grass, catmint, sedum, and mock orange with a few “experiments” thrown into the mix. The photos above show what they *may* look like grown.

We had to buy the plants early before they sold out at the nursery, even though we still had some snow on the ground. So, from the start, the pressure…