Backyard Herb Garden

A few months ago we decided we needed a little greenery inside and plated these 2 cute little succulent plants:

They currently live on the windowsill in the kitchen and we love having something pretty and green to look at anytime we do dishes, etc. However, if you look past the cute succulents, you can see that our view was a bunch of bricks, dirt, and leaves....which is our tiny backyard. I use the term "backyard" very loosely. Technically, we own the little patio right outside our living room, but the rest of the area in the back belongs to the condo. 

This is part of our little patio - it's a small rectangle shape that ends where the brick wall starts.

(And just to assuage any decorating fears, no, we didn't hang that strange face/mask on the wall...it was there when we moved in and we haven't replaced it with anything yet! And we also plan to eventually replace that little table....it's all a work in progress!)

So we're the only people with direct access to our patio, and the space right above it (we're also the only unit with a patio but that's a whole different story). Our HOA used to at least have gardeners come and pull out weeds and trim plants, but over the past few months it's started to look like "our backyard" was totally abandoned. 

Vast nothingness (with just one lone tree, which is right behind me in this picture):

So, we decided to beautify part of the back yard, just a little bit. 

Not sure if you can tell from the picture, but the dirt in the backyard is so incredibly packed down that we knew we would need to either buy or make some kind of planter if we wanted to try to grow anything. Taylor came up with the idea of creating small cinder block planters and sketched out a design. We also knew that we wanted to incorporate a rock ground covering into our plan.

We went to home depot and bought all the materials, and after many trips to and from the car, ended up with this:

This is what it looks like from a distance. Oh, we also bought a big metal planter from Crate & Barrel and planted two little rosemary bushes!

Next we bought a slew of herbs and flowers:

And then we planted:

This is what it looks like with everything planted:

We planted parsley, oregano, yellow bell peppers, English lavender, green basil, impatients, 

sweet mint, peppermint, and purple basil.  

This is the finished product...we love it! 

This is what you can see if you were sitting on the patio - just a smidge of a view:

But the smidge of a view from the patio is definitely worth it, because it's a majorly better view from the kitchen. Which, if you remember, is where the beautification projected started out in the first place. Instead of dirt and leaves, we now see this:

If you've been following along, you're probably wondering about the rest of the back yard. Well for now, it's still a bunch of leaves, but we're starting to plan out what we can do....that will be phase 2!