Yard Update

January 25th

February 27th

March 8th

October 4th

This will be known as the Year We Tore Out Everything And Tried to Re-Build It. My goodness.

See, in the first picture, my husband had just taken away a (leaning) block wall. We were going to spend a Saturday or two digging out the front, back to the OLD boulder wall that a previous owner had buried. Problem was, the boulder wall only came halfway down the driveway, and stopped. Drat. (That's the second picture.)

Enter My Uncle, The Contractor. He soundly rebuked us for attempting to do this with shovels and wheelbarrows, brought in a whole posse of Guys With Trucks, and made short work of pretty much everything. If we're doing the side yard, we might as well take out the driveway while we're at it. Oh, if you'll have the concrete truck here, let's take out the back patio and re-pour that...oh, and make a path along the side....a patio in front...new steps....yeah, we'll take out the front entry steps... it was crazy. BUT, we love it. We love that an average sized person can now walk up the steps to our front door without getting stuck (it was that narrow before), we love the garden space out front, we love the places to sit. The kids eat lunch on the front steps nearly every day.

I love that so many people were willing to come and lend a hand for a project that clearly and quickly spiraled out of anything we could handle on our own, especially since my husband changed from employed to self-employed mid-project right about the same time I discovered myself to be pregnant. His time available to work in the yard dwindled while my energy and agility disappeared entirely, and we couldn't have done this alone.

We're still looking for a load of wood chips to come and mulch around the garden beds, and have plans for more plantings, but all in good time. For now, we have good soil and good sun, and a lot to be thankful for!

Around the patio I've planted wild roses, garlic, day lilies, crocosmia, lung wort, and star lilies. The top of the wall is bordered by a 4-foot-wide garden bed, where I've planted loads of June-bearing strawberries and more clumps of day lilies. I have about 200 daffodil bulbs we rescued from the earth movers, and they'll go in front of the garden boxes, and around the patio up top. We plan on getting blueberry bushes to plant along the right side of the yard, unless our neighbor on the other side decides in the spring he's ready to get going on the blueberry hedge he's wanted in HIS yard for years.

I am massively too late to plant anything in the garden other than radishes, but I have some very slow-growing kale in my backyard garden box I plan to chop down a bit and transplant to the front to see if it will survive. It's so shady in the backyard, it took 3 months for my kale to get 12 inches high, and by that time the slugs and bugs had already eaten feast after feast. It's either transplant or compost now!

Now that everything is in place...call me pig headed, call me naive, but I really think we can manage a spring planting. Even with a Spring baby. We've come so far in this project, PLEASE let us have the presence of mind to steal the time to get a planting in next Spring!