Yard Work

I write mostly about my sweet children here on this blog but I thought I would share all the hard work Tim and I have been doing around our yard.

First let me explain.......
Our house was rented by some people and let me tell you the people trashed the place. You would not believe the things we have found in the yard while cleaning brush and flower beds. It is just plain disgusting.  The man who sold us the house, bought the house (a foreclosure) and then he fixed it up and put it on the market. That is when our neighbors told us about the house and we took a look at it. We fell in love with it and bought it. Is everything exactly the way we want it? ...no, but SLOWLY we are beginning to feel like it is our home and that we are not just living in another person's house. The "to-do" list is just about as long as the day we moved in and the only room we have painted is Baby A's room.  We will get to things one by one.
This year we decided to spend a little of our time and energy on the yard.  We have a HUGE yard and about half of it is wooded that for now we intend to keep as just that...wooded and filled with poison ivy. We'll get to it eventually but one thing at a time.....
We have no gutters on our home because well they would be pointless to have. With all the trees (at least 7 of them our sweet gum trees and drop those annoying gumballs) close to our house we would never be able to keep the gutters clean and they would constantly be stopping up. Sounds like a headache to me. No gutters means the rain just beats the poor ground below and washes it all away. Not good.
The first on our list to fix our drainage problem and make our yard look nicer was the front flower bed.

(Before pictures above and below, with the butterfly bush already removed)

 It collects tons of leaves in the fall (as you can see), has horrible drainage and it is an enormous space. We started by simply cutting back our butterfly bush and that is when we discovered it was diseased and dying. We ripped it out and left the bed full of leaves for a few weeks trying to decide what to do with it.
We tossed out ideas like......making a huge flower bed, making a smaller flower bed and sodding the rest but in the end we decided to just sod the entire bed making it none existent anymore.
Tim had to borrow a truck and trailer to get a pallet of sod and a pallet of field stone and while he was picking all that up I was in charge of clearing out the bed and tilling up the dirt so it was ready for the sod to be laid. That was the hardest part, in my opinion!

(cleaned out and ready for sod)

We planted a Japanese Maple in the middle of  it with some phlox around the base. We also planted an evergreen and hosta on either side of the steps going up to the front door. All these should be very low maintenance and hopefully do very well in these spots. The grass will help everything from washing away and we also placed field stone all the way around the area so the rain won't beat the grass up below. 

(After)

All together it took about 1/4 of a pallet of Bermuda sod and about 1/2 of a pallet of field stone to finish this spot off. I am so happy with the end result. It makes me smile every time I pass by it, which is good since that was exactly what I told Tim I wanted for my birthday.

I also put flowers in every pot I had and lined my steps with those. I have actually added 2 more pots of flowers since this picture was taken.

On Good Friday we got our garden all done and planted 4 tomato plants, 4 jalapeno plants, 4 green bell pepper plants, 4 okra seeds, several squash seeds and a cabbage plant. Fingers crossed that our seeds do something but I am really not expecting them to. I must thank Tim's brother for helping get this done. I was still worn out from the flower bed the week before and don't think I would have been much help tilling it all up.

After getting the garden done Tim started cutting the grass while me and Jonathan made a fire pit in the back yard. I love it!!! It just so happened that I had bought all the stuff for s'mores that week. I had no clue we would have the time/ materials to make the fire pit but I was glad I picked up the stuff for s'mores!

Baby A loved the peeps! I bought them as a replacement for the marshmallow in the s'mores but the kids wanted to just eat the peeps instead. Good thing I had regular marshmallows too.

We also put Rascal's zip line, we got him for his birthday, up Good Friday morning and they have been loving it ever since. I would show you a picture but it is hard to take one with them in motion. Maybe soon.