This past Spring, the Water – Use It Wisely campaign had nearly 11,000 entries to its Drab 2 Fab Backyard Rehab promotion with ABC/15 TV. If you entered, THANK YOU!
If you didn’t win, we invite you to live vicariously through our winners, Lisa and Alan Osborne of Avondale.
Today launches a 10-part video series where you will meet the winners. See their drab backyard. And watch it become fabulous as our amazing Xeriscape designers and promotional partners, including Ewing Irrigation & Landscape Supply, the Arizona Nursery Association and its Plant Something campaign, and the Arizona Landscape Contractors Association bring it to life.
Here’s what Lisa Osborne had to say about getting their backyard rehabbed:
“We want to be able to incorporate all of our aspects of our family living. And also we want something that is easy to use that I don’t have to stress about watering every day. And we want to make sure that it’s colorful all year round.
So the problems we’ve run into with our backyard is first, we wanted to have everything renovated, and we wanted to do it when we bought the house. But we decided we wanted to put a pool in, didn’t do it, we waited. The market crashed. Once the market crashed, we decided well we’re not doing anything now because we won’t recoup the value of the house.
So then it just sat here. And then it became this huge daunting task of where do we begin, what do we do? We just didn’t know where to start. So we put in a couple of trees. The trees obviously haven’t grown. They’re ugly, they get no water. And we really haven’t done anything other than we’re great at growing aloe vera and we’re great at growing weeds.
So we have a dog, and we have to incorporate her needs into our backyard because she’s part of our family. We adopted her last year and she’s a Belgian Tervuren so she’s rather large and she’s got lots of energy. She has this whole path that she’s made in our gravel bed back here. It goes all the way around the fence. She makes laps on it every day. It’s her favorite thing to do. And then she likes to play ball and she likes to play chase and different things. So we want to make sure that we incorporate her needs into our backyard also.
We had, last year we had a couple different landscapers come in, and they obviously hated us because they were like, “Well, what do you want? Tell us what you want.” We don’t know.
Our simple goal is to have a usable backyard that works for our family and then also works for our dog and is great for entertainment purposes. And then, in the end, we can have everybody over and enjoy the backyard together.
Thank you so much, Wayne Drop.”
Join us each week as we take you step-by-step through the process of rehabbing Lisa and Alan’s drab back yard into a dream, water-wise Xeriscaped retreat.
Even their dog will love it!
You’ll learn how to design, plan and install your own water-wise landscape.