How to Build a Butterfly Island #DigIn

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot, but all thoughts and opinions are my own. I am so thrilled to have this opportunity to work with The Home Depot and receive product to enhance our backyard.

Yesterday you saw how I started prepping for my Butterfly Island backyard project with our shopping trip to Home Depot–you can see there about our shopping trip and what we purchased. We were there for a while, but had a ton of fun picking our our materials. Today I’m going to show you how we made our island and the before and after shots! Here’s a reminder of the before:

And here’s the After:

Quite a difference, huh?! This project was so much fun and my son and husband both helped me complete it. Andrew loved playing in the dirt and finding the worms while his daddy and I worked! So here’s what we did to get our Butterfly Garden in tip top shape…

We started with a blank slate by pulling out our dead bush, removing the plants that were overgrown, and just getting down to the bare earth. My hubby did a lot of the digging and using the rake to even the ground out–and I took photos LOL.

From there we started laying our layers of bricks. We used some sand to help set them in place and we stacked them up three tall. Our son helped us stack the bricks and we gave them a day or two to settle into place.

After we finished our bricks we added several layers of fresh Miracle Gro garden soil to our garden to raise the bed up to the height of the bricks and to provide our flowers with nice fresh soil. You’ll see in the photo that we had enough bricks to start a third row and we thought that looked better, so we got more bricks to continue one more row up to add more height.

Our son LOVED getting his little hands dirty and helping us get everything put together.

From there we started laying out where we wanted our flowers to go. Butterflies tend to prefer these long spindly type of flowers we noticed, so we went with the Home Depot’s recommended flowers and picked up a few varieties of butterfly friendly flowers/bushes and tried to get a variety of colors. Home Depot’s list of recommended butterfly and caterpillar attracting flowers can be found HERE. We used an azalea bush in the back corner, along with verbena and lantana–because Ohio had many late frosts this year, we did have a harder time finding some of these flowers locally, so we tried to get a good variety of colors of the ones we did find.

We laid them all out evenly in our flower bed and tried to give some space between them all to grow–we’re hoping as they get bigger they fill the area in a a bit more…it’s a big space for a flower garden, so we didn’t want to overwhelm it too much with too many flowers.

 

Once we got done planting we mulched over everything with a thick layer of black mulch…it really made the flowers pop more.

And here’s the finished product…I love how the bricks added height and depth to the garden!

I found some gorgeous butterfly stakes, so I bought three of them and scattered them throughout our garden. I really feel like it needs a bird bath or something now…I have some more decorating ideas in my mind for this little space, but I want them to come naturally, so when I see something I’ll know it’s meant to be there.

Now our garden is a integral piece of our backyard that really stands for itself. We are so in love with the final result we want to work on our other back corner garden bed!

Tomorrow I’ll be back sharing a VIDEO with you about my gardening experience and working with my little guy at the Home Depot Kids Workshop!

It’s home improvement time, and The Home Depot has everything you need to #DigIn for Spring. No matter what projects you want to tackle, they have great values on all you need. They’re ready to help you with renovation ideas and expert advice, too.

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This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot.