Constant Gardening

 I have been meaning to take some pictures of all the yard work we've been doing before I published a new blog entry and I finally got the camera out this morning.  It feels like Jeff and I have just been working in the yards non-stop for the past month and a half because, well, that is all we have been doing!  Honestly, I felt like 90% of my brain power was being used to continually think about plants - I have learned a lot over the last few months!  Now that we have nearly finished planting the front yard (I planted over 200 hundred plants!) and we have done a big hunk of work in the back yard (all that we can afford for this season), plus we bought some outdoor furniture for the deck, maybe we can take a little break.  Oh no, wait, we still have to finish the form work for the back concrete patio.  Then we can take a break.  Mmhmm.  Ya.

First, we cut down a whole lotta trees and re-stacked a whole lotta firewood. I enlisted the help of family, again, but I think Scott and Lorelei win the prize for best team work!

Then we had Nick, our excavator guy, come back to scrape out everything left behind, except for the Holly tree and my Raspberry bushes in the back.  I think Callum spent at least several hours in the machine with him, and Nick even let him do some of the work.  Callum LOVED it.

 And Max got a turn too, of course.

This is what the back yard looks like today,  You can see the area in the back prepared for future raised vegetable beds and a potting/storage shed.  Where you see all the trailer-trash toys is where we will build a playhouse for the boys.  The funny rectangles on the ground will be our future patio and a bike shed on top of all that to-be-buried pile of concrete.

  

Here is my now rather pleasant deck.  We are still missing a few corner pieces for the sofa, but they were out of stock for a few weeks. 

 I started a little deck garden since I couldn't get my raised vegetable beds built this year.  I've got herbs on the railing, a couple tomato plants that share pots with various lettuces, a couple strawberry plants and my dahlias.

 I love my dahlias.

And I love all the Echeveria I planted in the front yard. (I have a new obsession with Succulents, actually, but more on that later).

 So, here is the front yard.  If you can't remember what it looked like before we bought it, I got this image off Google Streetview: