Yard Work - Part 1

We bought our first house, also the one we are living in right now, about 2 years ago. In fact we marked our 2 year anniversary a couple of weeks ago. Ever since we got the house we have been doing something or the other starting with painting the rooms first year, then fixing the kitchen, renovating the bathroom, staining the deck and now finally this year doing some landscaping.

For once I can take almost all the credit for the work I have done so far. Dear husband helped on occasions where real manpower was needed. I started out with the tiny garden on the side of the house. Every year in spring it blooms tulips, daffodils and then we have roses and strawberries. The garden also housed a LOT of weeds. One would be tempted to use a weed killer solution like Round-up but beware, it can easily kill your daffodils and tulips. So I had to do some hard work - pull out all the weeds one by one by hand. An hour and a few rose thorn scrapes, the garden was almost weed free. Now to keep it weed free.. I decided to mulch. You can do a lot more than just mulching, like covering the area with some kind of special perforated sheet that doesn't allow weed growth.. but that was too much effort for me. So I decided to settle with just mulching.

These days they have rubber mulch - made out of recycled rubber. Looks just like regular mulch but apparently lasts 10 times longer and doesn't lose color. So I got this dark brown colored mulch, which I think goes well with the house, and mulched the tiny garden. It looked beautiful, but just a week or two later I noticed that the mulch is getting dirty and so doesn't look dark brown anymore and the weeds are starting to come back. I went online and realized my mistake. When you mulch make sure you have atleast an inch thick layer of mulch. Just a thin spread is not enough - duh! So I did that and vola - it looks great and has not shown rigorous weed growth since.
Pic 1, 2: In spring right after finishing mulching
Pic 3: In June