A little background on the house…when we moved in the house had been unoccupied for around 7 months so the yard was a little overgrown. Whenever there is a nice weekend we are working in the yard and plugging away at it…often it feels like we haven’t done much so I have found that it’s nice to take pictures along the way. It’s a great reminder of where you came from and I feel like it helps me to keep going!
Today we continued to work on the “flower beds” under the tree..I don’t know if they are really supposed to be flower beds but i’m not sure what else they would be. The problem with the location of the flower beds is that we really can’t plant anything in them. They get so many pine needles from the trees and not a lot of light so we have decided not to plant anything there. The main thing that will grow there are weeds!!
Here is what it looked like last summer
Last summer we hired our friend Matt from church who helped us get it to this stage
But a lot of it grew back. One of my co-workers mentioned putting down newspaper, then mulch would help with the weeds. So today we finished weeding (AGAIN!!) the bases of the trees, after we were done weeding we sprayed some Round Up, then we laid down newspaper, weed barrier cloth, then a thick layer of much!! I know it’ a lot of layers but are trying really hard to keep those suckers away!!
So here is what it looks like today…it will be interesting to see if it works!
Now onto the garden. When we moved in we had talked about having a garden. Last year we didn’t have time to prep the area so we did a garden in pots. I highly recommend it if you live in a condo or a house with a small yard grow some herbs or a few veggies! It was great and Taylin really enjoyed helping me harvest our crop.
We knew we wanted to have our garden in a specific corner of our back yard but it was going to be a lot of work to get it ready. When we were first doing yard work Tom decided to make a pile of all the yard waste that we would “take to the dump later” well that didn’t happen for quite some time and the pile grew back into the grass and started sprouting new things.
Its ok now because Tom built me two awesome planters and has helped me tear out all the grass to get the area ready for our garden. Today was fun because we were able to get some of our wood chips down around the boxes today. It’s starting to feel like it’s all coming together!
This year I’m growing lettuce, zucchini’s, strawberries, cantaloupe, pumpkins, green onions, basil, cilantro, and cucumbers. We will see how everything does this year…hopefully better then last year!
We are almost done with the garden a couple more things we still need to do is dig out the rest of the grass 😦 and build a small fence around it… still the progress is great and super encouraging!!
sydneyrueross.com 