I love spring.
Mostly I just love the light at the end of the tunnel. The mud drying up, the trees budding, all of it. It makes me motivated and happy, and ready for NEW and CLEAN!
Sad thing is, it’s only February 11th, it’s still like a month and a half until winter is over, but I see the signs! There are most definitely Crocus sprouting up in my yard, and the sun has been showing its beautiful self more often these days (even though everyone says it’s not gonna stay) and I am taking full advantage of it!
On Friday my mom, Mr. Gaunt and I went to the Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle. It’s a huge yearly convention for gardening, I’ll blog about it probably tomorrow. Anyway we bought a few awesome new gardening tools, and today I decided to use the morning sun and put those new tools to work.
I wont lie, the summer burned me out on gardening, and we have hardly touched the yard since we got married. Needles to say, it looked like crap. So today we did the following:
-Raked all the pine needles and weird pine cones off the front lawn.
-Weeded the front beds.
-Dug up the 3 gross rose bushes from the front beds.
-Hacked back the big nasty corner bush (we need to rent a chainsaw to get the stump out)
-Edged the sidewalk
-Cleaned up the porch
-Pruned to side roses and cleaned up the brush
-Pruned our big evergreen tree.
On top of the front yard we also did a ton of work to the NASTY back yard. It was kind of a disaster. There was like old dead plants, wedding milk glass succulents everywhere, rotting pumpkins, garbage, oh lordy, embarrassing!
Things we did:
-Weeded all the beds, and completely cleared out the larger center bed. We actually have plans to lay grass over this bed this spring (more on this later)
-Cleaned up the mess of wood my brother left when he moved out.
-Transplanted all the Succulents from their Milk glass into their barrels, and drilled drainage holes in said barrels.
-Pruned the grapes.
-Pruned and tied up our prim rose-bush on the fence.
-Cleared out old dead Morning Glory vines from the fence.
-Threw away garbage, leftover pots, and other such nastyness.
-Hosed down the patio
-Hacked back the old dead blueberries (this will also be removed when we rent the chainsaw)
So yeah, the yard is looking way better. I mean, November-May everyone’s yard looks like muddy crap, but at least it’s cleaned up now, and we have a good start for Spring. We have some smaller scale plans for the back yard this year, but what we really want is to focus on the front lawn. I’m planning on re-shaping the front beds, edging, mulching, and planting some new shrubs. Also replacing the stepping-stones to new non broken ones. I would also loooove to dump some gravel on the driveway, as it’s a slip and slide mud fest right now, but we can’t afford that.
I also have two big blisters on my thumb, which is the only way you know you worked hard in your yard…duh. (:
