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FacebookOne day, very soon, I will defeat my yard.
Nearly a year ago, Hubby and I bought our first house. Along with the house itself and our whopping big yard, which we love to itty bitty pieces, came the weeds, which we do not. We moved in at the beginning of December, which meant that everything around the house was basically a pile of dead plant life. Everything looked pathetic and scraggly and brown, and it was impossible to distinguish flowers from grass from shrubs from weeds. We decided to let it all be and see what bloomed during the growing seasons of the spring and summer.
What bloomed was a big old mess.
Evidently, the previous owner — a single, military-type man — was not blessed with a green thumb, or even the slightest inclination to exercise some upkeep on his lawn. Considering this was the same person who left us with a rotting shed to tear down, I’m not really sure why we were surprised.
I’m admittedly not very good with plants either, but even I could tell things were terribly amiss in the yard. Our front yard has two above-ground planters, which would have been lovely to have if not for the cluttery clumps of plants that lived therein. Both were overflowing with plants crammed so close together they were choking each other to death, competing for the sunlight and water and space. The larger of the two planters was full of flowers that do not fare well in direct sunlight and had clearly not been weeded or tended to in years. Vines and grasses and weeds tangled through their stems unabated. The smaller planter was home to a heap of bushes.
I kept saying I would try to do something about the mess, but, procrastinator that I am, I managed to keep putting it off. It was always too hot or too rainy, or I was too tired or too busy. The one time I really tried to pull weeds in the big planter, I ended up slicing my fingers open, which didn’t exactly encourage me to jump back in.
Eventually, I promised myself I would start working once the weather cooled and we were firmly in the lovely fall season. It gave some of the weeds a chance to die down, and I got my parents on board to help once we found a good-weather weekend to begin.
My parents arrived on our doorstep with tools. The menfolk stayed at the house and had fun tackling some overgrown tree branches with the chainsaw, while my mother and I went out to the local nursery to stock up on shiny new plants. I emerged much poorer in finances, but with a whole carload of beautiful things: 200 tulip and daffodil bulbs, a Red Rocket Crape Myrtle tree, a brilliantly red Burning Bush, four lovely purply-red bushes whose name I can neither spell or pronounce, and, best of all, a Coral Bark Maple tree. I had never seen a tree with red bark before, and I was thrilled.
While our pug, Oscar, frolicked around the yard, the four of us grabbed shovels and rakes and hoes and laid siege to the big planter, ripping its soil free of the overgrowth. Slowly but surely, we started to see dirt again, the light at the end of our gardening tunnel. After what probably amounted to a few hours of this, including my mild freak-outs over the bug life we were digging up and my dog attempting to pig out on clumps of gardening soil, we had an empty planter once again.
Our next project involved the front of the house, which sported a bizarrely landscaped swath of ground. Instead of grass or mulch, a huge area of our yard was inexplicably covered in ugly gray gravel, which looked like it belonged on the bottom of an aquarium. The effect was jarring, making the whole area look stark and cold despite the two little evergreen trees that somehow survived there. We attacked the stones with shovels, heaving big piles beneath my porch and exposing the ground to lay down mulch and grass seed. The sad thing, my dad noted, was that those ugly rocks probably cost the previous hapless owner a lot of money.
From there, things became a lot more fun. We got to start our planting, measuring and digging holes and mixing soils and giving my new plants a home. I love to sit on my porch and look out at my yard now — the beautiful colors of my new plants have been a wonderful addition to what was an otherwise boring and weed-riddled landscape.
The yardwork still isn’t completely done. But bit by bit, Hubby and I are reclaiming it as our own, declaring that we will never let it get that bad again. We hope.
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