Project Backyard

For some strange reason I chose today, of all hot-as-hell days, to start Project Backyard Cleanup 2017. Maybe something broke and I couldn't stand looking at it anymore.

Let's take a quick trip down memory lane and check out the progress we've made since purchasing the house.

Exhibit A: Unkept jungle. Rat habitat. Messy flowerbeds. Call it what you will. The back corner was a hodgepodge of old tree stumps, vines, and trash. We had to take a chainsaw to a tree that had fallen and had been dragged to rot in the corner. We screamed at bugs when we moved it all out. (The first "we" with the chainsaw was obviously Chris. The second "we" screaming at bugs was all me.)

 

Over the course of several weeks, we managed to clean things up and make them look tidy. Much sweat, a little blood, and a burst of tears (when I once fell over on a rake and hurt myself.)

Exhibit B: Taken maybe 2 years ago? Managed and tidy, if still ugly. Notice how the corner behind the (leaky) birdbath is nice and clean.

This is how that corner looks today*. The jungle had taken over again. In an act of desperation, Chris bought some industrial strength vegetation killer and nuked the whole thing, with the exception of that corner, because I forbade him to kill my gardenia and rosemary.  He even sprayed a little onto the back neighbor's jungle, because it started to climb over the fence and invade our side.

*This is how it looks after hours of tearing out grass, weeds, vines, and discovering a new sinkhole. The rosemary is scraggly and the gardenia didn't even flower this year, because it's so choked.
I didn't take a before picture out of sheer embarrassment. You couldn't even see the fence. I'm afraid to go deep into the actual corner because I'm not sure what's living in it.

Here are the project plans:

I decided to make the flowerbed a lot smaller, and turn the rest of it into grass. It's so big that it can't be kept up and the jungle keeps taking over and it's ugly and probably harboring critters. So the new edge of the flowerbed is to the left of the tree, where I moved the bricks.

Here's where the new flowerbed starts. I chose that spot mostly because there's a raised sprinkler head that would be really weird and annoying in the middle of the yard, but makes sense if it were watering a flowerbed.

My to-do list involves removing all the old bushes and weeds. I've also got to fill the surprise sinkhole*. I'll need to clean out the rest of that scary corner and trim the bay trees and oleander. Next I'll trim and transplant the rosemary and gardenia, which has to wait until winter or I'll likely kill them both. Then next spring I'll need to sod the areas that will turn into grass.

It's a lot of work but here's hoping that this will make things prettier and easier to maintain in the long run.

*When researching how to fill sinkholes, I came across a cute idea to put a time capsule into the sinkhole before filling it. Totally going to do that!