Thursday, November 13, 2008

Monday, November 10, 2008

work weekend

"On tap for next weekend: trimming back about a dozen lilacs, rototilling my future garden area(s), painting windows, raking leaves, killing (more) weeds, spreading grass seed, moving a crab apple tree, spreading mulch." That's what I wanted to get done. Ha.

Friday was beautiful!!! Saturday, work day, was awful. Rain and sleet, mud and grime. We hired two guys Jon works with, had his friend Matt and Matt's dad over, had my hard working husband, and ... me. Thankfully I had raked the front yard Friday afternoon, when the weather was lovely, but since we didn't have any yard waste bags, they just sat in piles on the front lawn getting wet Saturday morning. There was no way in hell I was going to try to tackle the back yard. It took me 45 minutes just to rake the front!

So what did we get done? Basically nothing on my list. I did have some help bagging the leaves and I spread grass seed in the front and back yard--in the sleety wetness--right before my back gave out. I knew it was going to happen, I just didn't know when. Jon and company did crazy stuff in the back yard. They moved a whole bunch of really big concrete blocks and rocks to our ever expanding "random rocks, blocks, and landscaping paraphernalia" region in the backyard. Also, there were these railroad ties being used as rudimentary landscape timbers that were removed and chopped up into burnable pieces for our fire pit. There was also a set of bars installed by the original owners to use for hanging clothes lines--cemented into the ground starting at about 18"-24" and ending at least 2' below that! These things were installed to stay! But they needed to come out so that we can move the shed from its present inconvenient location to right behind the garage (where the railroad ties and laundry poles were). Now we have even more DIRT lying around from where everything was dug up! Well, with the appearance of the snow this morning, I can maintain a blissful ignorance about the appalling state of my back yard. Yay snow?

Monday, November 3, 2008

winterizing

This being the first year we've owned a house, we're trying to figure out all that we have to do to winterize--and get help doing it. Our yard is a disaster--that backyard anyway. There are huge patches of dirt all over the place from where we've had "extra" from other projects and dumped it in a low patch in the back. And there are a lot of low patches. There are still a lot of low patches. It's looking pretty bare back there, but I knew that this was going to be a year of removal and hoped that next year would be a year of planting. It looks like grass seed will be essential to the plan of improving the yard to make our 1/2 acre more "Edenic." It'll take a few years, but it will look wonderful.

On tap for next weekend: trimming back about a dozen lilacs, rototilling my future garden area(s), painting windows, raking leaves, killing (more) weeds, spreading grass seed, moving a crab apple tree, spreading mulch.

No problem.