It seems like we've been doing a lot of smaller projects as of late. Nothing major, other than painting or installing stuff. But, this weekend, we are tackling a much needed re-do to our landscaping. We did our landscaping 9 yrs ago and have done some minor upkeep over the years. But, we were so tired of looking at our flower beds and seeing more crab grass than flowers, so we decided to bite the bullet and re-do it all.
Our 7 loads of rock came on Tuesday. I had Tater get in the picture, so you could see how many rocks 7 loads is! It's a WHOLE lot! Pete took the day off, so we would have 4 days to work on it and thank goodness he did, because this is going to take us ALL of those 4 days, if not more. Our plan is to dig up all the weeds and get rid of some of our flowers and the mulch that is there and add new heavy-duty weed barrier and rocks. We are going to add a new mailbox and add rocks and maybe some plantings there. We're going to plant a tree in our backyard in memory of Mrs. Brannon, the kids' social worker that passed away a couple months ago. AND, if we actually are still able to fit it in, we want to build a firepit. This is only day one, so we'll see if we're able to accomplish all of this by the end of Monday. I'll be REALLY surprised if we do! But, here we are, at the end of Day 1, and I have a few "Before" and "After" pictures for you.
This is the south side of our house. That big bush is our raspberry bush and we have tons of irises along the rest of it. This is the "Before".
This is the "After". We pulled out an entire area of Irises, because the raspberry bush was crowding it and we want to let it have room to grow. When we dug this all up and ripped up the weed barrier in this area we discovered a HUGE ant colony. It stretched from the bush to nearly the end of the house. We would pull up the barrier and find thousands upon thousands of ants and their eggs. It was DISGUSTING!! I love the look of a pretty garden, but I loathe gardening. I hate bugs and dirt and all of it, so thankfully Pete was very good about letting me take breaks from it and keep my distance, at times, from the bugs that we uncovered.
This is a little farther down from the pictures above. Same side of the house, though. That big mass of stuff is literally just crab grass with a few lilies thrown in. You couldn't even see the lilies anymore. We dug up that entire area, since it too was getting crowded out and we were tired of the stupid crab grass growing everywhere.
This is what it looks like now. Again, same side as before, just a different angle, so you can see how we spaced it out more and added all the rock. That's as far as we got today. Might not seem like a whole lot, but it was a full-day of work! Pete also did some more small stuff around the front of the house, but this was the biggest part of our day.
As always, Tater was by our side and made sure to help us the whole time. :-) He loved spending the whole day outside with us. Just felt bad that there wasn't any shade for him. Hopefully we'll get that tree up in the next couple of days, so he'll have some shade soon.
These irises were just in the one spot that we cleared out. Pete took the entire lot of them up to our friends, James and Donna. They're going to be working on their own landscaping project this weekend too! They only live a couple blocks away, so it'll be fun to trade off some of our "produce". ;-) So, here we are. Day One is complete. We are both a little sunburned, definitely both exhausted, and ready to wake up and tackle another full day of digging, planting, and rock-laying! Last time we did this, we were still in our 20s. Little bit harder to have the same amount of energy 10 yrs later when we're staring down our 40s! ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment