I've spent the last decade playing in my front yard with the object being to create "something," even though I had no idea what "something" was. All those years of guessing, planting, and mulching have resulted in what I have termed as my Annual Yard Adventure. And I'm extremely happy with the results.

There are, however, a few areas in the yard that I have completely ignored for no reason other than I had no idea what to do with them. A decade later, those areas now stand out like a sore thumb in the middle of all of the progress. This is where the title to this year's edition of the Yard Adventure originates from. I've decided to address a few long standing issues this year, starting today.

Today's project begins at the front of the house. Other than keeping the loropetalums pruned I've done very little in the way of maintenance to the entire front of the house even though a significant amount of weeds has slowly been taking over. "I'll get to it eventually" has been the response for years.

"Eventually" finally arrived today, the day where I break out the gloves, trowel, and bucket and try to clean up the front of the house. But first, I took my usual stroll around the yard to see what was happening.

Four days ago, the Chinese Snowball was brilliant white in full bloom. But thanks to some more heavy rain at the end of this blooming cycle, it looks like it snowed under the snowball.

Well what do you know . . .

I've got a bearded iris ! This is the first time I've had an iris in a color other than yellow.

The Goldmound Spireas look great, like they do every year.

I'm seeing more iris blooms on this side of the yard.

Yellow Flag Irises.

All of the Coronation Gold Yarrow plants are green and growing. What was originally five plants became nine after a round of division a few years ago. Encircling this area with irises, while beautiful, turned out to be a bad idea because they blocked sunlight from the yarrows. I'm seeing a few flowers beginning to appear, which is good.

Half of my Dogwood Cherokee Princess still seems dead. I'm not sure what's going on here, other than I'm not alone. My neighbor is having the same problem.

The Husker Red Beardtongues are growing rapidly. The comments I made about surrounding the yarrows with irises also apply here. Very bad idea !

I've also got more iris blooms on the driveway of the yard.

Quite a few more flowers have appeared since the last series of pics four days ago.

Since I've lived here, most of my weeding, planting, and mulching efforts have concentrated on my front yard. I haven't done a whole lot to the area directly in front of the house other than basic pruning maintenance and planting a few things to fill the gaps. The grass in my yard is more weeds than anything else. Those weeds have been slowly migrating toward the foundation. Today was the day to try and clean this area up a bit. I grabbed some gloves, a trowel, and a bucket and got to work.

Not only did I want to remove all of the weeds against the house, I also wanted to identify the line where the grass ends. After a lot of digging and pulling, I finally got the area cleaned out.

The area seen in the photo above was especially challenging. I'm a big fan of the tall border grass, (next to the downspout in the photo above), that is commonly used to surround and highlight an area. But if left unchecked, (like I did for a decade), it will spread, in my case, all along the foundation. It took a while. But I eventually got everything cleaned up.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do here at the moment. The most likely scenario is that I'll put some landscaping fabric down and cover it with a layer of mulch to make everything look neat and orderly. But for now, I'm glad to get rid of the weeds.

Completing this task also made me realize that if I'm going to do some weeding, I can't stop here. There are other areas in the yard that also need quite a bit of attention. So it looks like this will be an ongoing summer project.