Landscaping project

I have been working on a landscaping project for the front of my house.  I would like to give a huge thanks to Gene's Evergreens for giving me a great sketch to do the design.

Here are a few before photos of the shrubs that were cute originally but just morphed into gross blobs in the front yard.  We had no idea how to trim them and so they just looked horrible.  We did try to trim them.  We tried for several years, one year trimming in fall, one year trimming in the spring but it didn't make much difference and they still looked bad in the end.

After the shrubs:

The planned landscaping:

The finished result will be uploaded soon.  I have just finished planting but still need to get mulch.  I think it looks better already.

And let me just say that ripping those shrubs out and digging up the ground to put new shrubs in was probably the hardest thing I have ever done.  We had to rent a rota tiller for the yard because our ground was so hard!  A spade was actually broken during the process of marking off our area.  Did I mention the spade was about 2 days old?  lol  Thankfully we were able to take it back to the store and get a new one without much hassle.  The spade did have a guarantee that it should hold up to normal use.

After:

Carrot apple ginger juice

I have made this juice several times and have actually doubled the recipe.

6 carrots
4 apples
Ginger approx 1 inch or more to taste.

I have definitely gone through a lot of apples and carrots lately.

Verdict:  This stuff is amazing and I have been drinking it every morning!!

And my little princess even tried it.  She said "mmm yummy" but then didn't want anymore.  :)

Green juice

Ok, I am going to start to get a little healthier by adding some more vegetables into my diet.  So today I have made a few juices.  The first one was a green juice recipe.  Here is the link for this recipe  (http://www.fitsugar.com/Green-Detox-Juice-Recipe-21173645).

Here are the ingredients:
1/2 bunch of spinach
1 handful watercress
1/2 lemon (peeled)
1 celery stalk
2 apples
1 inch slice of ginger.

I actually upped the celery to 2 stalks and I didn't have watercress.  Now I'm not sure what 1/2 a bunch is because I only had bagged spinach so I shoved a bunch into the juicer.  I used a granny smith apple and a red delicious since that is what I had on hand.

Verdict:   It was tasty!!  I will make this one again for sure.  Might actually make it for work tomorrow.

Update:  If making for drinking the next day only add one stalk of celery as it became a bit more powerful overnight.  Still good but I could really taste that second stalk.