I don’t know if you have ever landscaped your yard or worked with a crew that landscaped a yard, but tree’s are expensive! Don’t get me wrong, saplings and small plants aren’t too expensive, but if you want anything with girth you are going to have to shovel out some cash. Summer and I are really trying to keep the spending reigns tight until we finish all of the expensive finishing work and then go to town on all of the little things that would be ‘cool’ but not necessary (paved driveway, landscaping, second car).

When envisioning living in the tropics, I always pictured a property covered in tropical plants, palm trees, hibiscus, snake plants, bamboo etc. Well, landscaping is about the only thing that wasn’t apart of the deal when we bought this house. There are a few really big mango tree’s in the back yard and a few giant royal palms bordering our yard, but aside from that combined with all the excavating we have had to do in the front yard we don’t have much green in our front yard at all. Not even grass. All the rock that we exposed excavating prevents grass from sprouting and will also require us to lay down topsoil before we plant any seed,

Our front yard is dirt, unless it’s raining…then it’s mud.

Mark helped us get the ball rolling on inexpensively landscaping our yard a few days ago. I went over to one of the houses he was landscaping and scored all of the trimmings and throwaway plants that would have otherwise turned into mulch. Summer and I spent the entire afternoon pruning and planting our new plants in the pouring rain. Now we have some green.

Tropical Landscaping from Scratch

Our truck filled with Tropical Plant trimmings and Palm Saplings

All of the plants laid out and organized, ready for planting

Summer checking out her hard work
We couldn’t fit the front yard into one shot on the camera so I used photoshop to
combine two pictures of our tropical landscaping from scratch