Taming The Jungle
Since the weather has been nice the past few weeks, my husband and I have taken on the daunting task of taming our back yard (or as Jason calls it, the Jungle). The photo above was taken in August when we moved into the house, and there were bees, spiders, snakes, poison ivy, and much more hiding in there. Needless to say, we do not want it to get that bad ever again. So, we started early, and have put a lot of blood and sweat into this backyard so far. We were even able to recruit family and friends to help one weekend. Ironically taming the backyard started with clearing out the front yard.
Jason started by removing a bunch of overgrown ground cover along the driveway and a fence that was falling down. We're going to replace most of this area with grass, but the part along the house has a beautiful weeping cherry tree, and I wanted to keep that here. So we moved daylilies and hostas from the jungle into this area, and added some lava rocks.
The daylilies were already quite large, so I started transplanting them all around the house; we even started giving some away, because there's so many. Our goal is to have as many daylilies and hostas transplanted, so we don't have to worry about killing them with weed killer and we can put down grass in the jungle area. I am still amazed at how many we have left to move. Once I got a decent amount of daylilies moved, we got some help to rake the area and look for the hosta that were just starting to sprout. We've found about 10 plants, but they're each 12-24 inches in diameter. Since there's so many and they're so big, we're still deciding where they're going to be moved to...
The weekend we had people over to help my mom and I started planting vegetable seeds in cardboard egg cartons, and Jason built me a raised garden bed. I'm really excited, because seedlings started to poke through about a week ago and now I have at least 3 seedlings of each plant! I'll definitely keep you posted on how my first garden goes throughout the summer.
Last weekend Jason and I did the most strenuous thing yet: pulling out over 150 square feet of patio pavers that were hiding in the jungle last summer. There were soooo many! We've had a few ideas of how to use them, but I'm pretty sure they're going to stay next to the deck until we get grass back there. We definitely don't want to move them any more than we have to.
No matter how much blood, sweat and tears goes into this backyard, it will all be worth it. In the end, this is what makes a house a home.
What yard work have you started already year?