Eschewing all else, we decided to put all our time, money, and effort into renovating our unruly backyard. We used the 3-day holiday weekend to make some serious headway, taking full advantage of all the MEMORIAL DAY SALES that happened at our local nurseries and home improvement stores. At HOME DEPOT, they had a sale on MULCH - 4 bags for 10 bucks. We ended up buying 60 BAGS OF MULCH on will call, picking up our order in bunches over the course of several days. Missy's little Yaris - THE BEAST - holds up to seven bags comfortably, and so we made the trip back and forth to Home Depot twice, sometimes thrice, a day. What started out as, "Let's put mulch in all the flower beds!" quickly turned into, "What the hell...let's mulch the ENTIRE BACKYARD!"
The back right corner of our backyard in progress:
We laid CUT LOGS down to help define a walking path in the very back corner of our yard. Just inside the border, we planted an EMPRESS WU HOSTA, which will eventually grow to 3 or 4 feet in diameter:
We finally made one of our wishes come true: to clear all the weeds, ivy, vines, and overgrowth away from the very back fence. Our original idea was to create a three foot-wide path along the perimeter of our yard, so that we could easily maintain our fence line:
We are planning on turning the old FIRE PIT in our yard into a butterfly and bee-friendly FLOWER GARDEN. Our plan is to surround the perimeter of the fire pit with rows of flowers, and then plant a mound of flowers in the center, after rehabilitating the dirt in the pit...
Needless to say, it's been extremely gratifying to work in our backyard, despite all the sweat, dirt, and aching muscles. We still have a long way to go towards completing our goals, but so far we've been able to find enough inspiration in the process to motivate us...
