I HATE MY YARD!!!!!!

Ok, I will first say that I love living in our new home and living here in Austin. We just moved here a couple of months ago from Dallas and we are loving it here. But I HATE the ground here! I never had this problem at our old home so it has to be the Austin ground! I guess because this is "hill country" the ground have LOTS of rocks or what I call "caliche". For those who don't know spanish that means gravel, I think. So basically the ground around our home is GRAVEL! Or so it seems to me, and this is why I think my flowers are dying! When we first moved into this house the landscaping in the front of the house was dead, so I decided to plant new plants and flowers. I was so proud of myself because this was the first time I had ever planted flowers or did any landscaping, and it was tough! (Our old house came with landscaping so I never had to worry about this.) What made it tough was that the more I dug the more rocks I came across. So I took out as many rocks as I could and put in some top soil and planted away. When I was done it looked great. I had bushes, bushes with flowers, monkey grass and cute yellow flowers. I was so proud! Then slowly they started dying, except for the monkey grass, and now it looks like crap. What's making it worse is that the neighbor's yard across the street looks fantastic! Although, he is a professional landscaper so he should have a nice yard! But still, it puts mine to shame. On top of this, we have two different grasses growing in our front and back yard! How? you ask. Well it's totally our fault. We bought seed to plant in the yard because it looked like the grass was dying (we now know it was only dormit) but we bought the WRONG seed. Laugh, I know you want to! So basically we have patches of two TOTALLY different grasses all over our yard. I really don't know what to do about any of it, because all of it needs to be redone, and that's a whole lot of work that I really don't want to do. Maybe I should hire the neighbor! hehe