Old House Confessions

I have finally decided to come clean. I hate landscaping. I don't like being hot and I sunburn easily and the thing that I really hate about it is that you can work for hours in the garden and a month later, it doesn't look like you did anything... oh, also there's the spiders. Terrified of spiders. The whole nurturing and growing thing is lost on me and if a concrete slab looked as good as a perennial garden, the cement mixer would be backing up to the house as I type.

I didn't even know where to begin with the existing perennial gardens in our yard. Looking out the kitchen window made me feel sick. We have kind of a snarky neighbor and I was imagining how she must complain to her husband about our disgusting jungle of weeds. There were three major planting beds, one that was roughly 17' square, one long narrow one 10'x 30' and then along the back side of the house there was a bed the width of the house and about 6 feet deep. Each of these beds was chock full of overgrown junk that stood about 4 feet high. Imagine how many spiders could hide in there, I get the heebeejeebees thinking about it.

Enter Mike and Judy M:

Chris' lovely parents LOVE landscaping! They love it in all of it's phases. Local Legend Mike M. seems to especially love the clearing of the land. He spent whole days (90 degrees, 95% humidity) tearing out the overgrown gardens and filling up yard waste bags, 22 in all. Mostly I pushed the wheelbarrow and moved rocks from one pile to another, then, when it was nearing time to plant, so I spent two separate half days with Judy M at the nursery picking things out. All the while LLMM was still slaving away, preparing for planting. Then it actually was time to plant and I pointed to spots on the ground where the holes should be and then I carried buckets of mulch from our chipper-palooza down to the beds. Basically, I only enabled the work, I didn't actually participate. Oh oh, I did sprinkle the grass seed around, that was really hard work, and I was bitten by a bug and it still is itchy, so there's that.

All of the credit for the amazing transformation belongs to LLMM and JM . Here are some in progress photos. This weekend I'll post some photos of the end result.