Notably lacking from any of this (aside from the succulent garden) is the idea of planting plants. This is the type of gardening I feel I can handle. Our first pass is get the planting areas into shape. We may go for a second pass where we add some plants or raised garden area.
Pool garden
The backside of the pool has white-ish pea gravel. The other areas of the pool have actual things growing. A couple of weeks ago I did a pass through the pool area and tore out anything that looks like a weed. It’s still a bit ragged around there but I’m not ready to commit to tearing all the plants out and turning that into a rock garden. So for now the pool area stays as it is and is going to be mostly untouched by this iteration of “gardening”.
Succulent garden
Last week I added succulents to the planter box outside our front door. Succulents: code for thrives on neglect. So far they’re not dead.
Behind the succulent garden is a tree that makes HUGE pink flowers. It’s cute and I don’t currently want to get rid of it.. but the big pink flowers die and fall onto the ground below. If I plant anything below this tree it’s make cleanup after the blossoms drop that much harder. At this point my plan is to leave the undertree garden empty. We’ll see if inspiration strikes later.
Across the front of the house next to the porch there a planting area with a couple of bushes that are overgrown with ivy. I both love and hate the ivy. I love it because a fall of ivy can hide a multitude of gardening sins. I hate it because it’s growing up between the boards of my porch and I’m fairly certain it’s trying to tear down the porch on the front of my house. I don’t have a plan to replace it.. and since it actually looks nice I’m hesitant to mess with it. So for now it stays.
Gazebo garden
When we bought the house the gazebo was surrounded by climbing vines. Last year we tore those out. I have a black thumb. I’m good at tearing out plants. It turns out there’s red lava rock under where the vines used to be. I hate it so much. So ok, the lava rocks need to go but I hate to waste resources (that and srsly.. how would you get rid of this?? just throw it in the trash?). So ok. The plan is to get rid of the lava rock, put down weed stop and then fill the area with the white-ish pea gravel just like the stuff along the backside of the pool. That should be pretty and should be all match-y match-y with the pool. I have NO idea what we would plant here. The plan at the moment is to get it to have rock in it and deal with planting stuff later.
Behind the fence, next to Fearghus’ project truck there’s a planting area. It’s about a foot wide and runs the length of the fence next to the parking area/shed. In our current configuration it’s a dumb place for a planting area. I have to go out the garage back door, navigate around the project truck and it’s slap up against the fence. No one is EVER going to see this to appreciate nice plants. Earlier this year I noticed it was overgrown and looking kind of trashy. Enter my brilliant plan. Step 1: knock down all the cobwebs between the project truck and the fence (eww). Step 2: pull all the weeds from the trashy planting area. Step 3: lay down weed stop and cover this over in the lava rocks from around the gazebo.
On Friday Erik and I started on this project this weekend. Friday I got all the weeds pulled. Today I pulled the stepping stones out, dug out a lot of the dirt (which was added the suculent garden in the front planting area), laid down weed stop and filled in the first section with the lava rock. So far so good. I have one more section to go. The plan is to overfill this area with lava rock to get it out of the gazebo planting area. In the long term we may use the lava rocks for french drains in the back yard (which gets a bit swampy when it rains) but for the moment this is just a holding area for the lava rock.
The Garden
When we bought the house there was a garden laid out in the back yard. Unfortunately this is in the part of the yard where the dogs run and I have a black thumb. So the garden got overgrown with weeds (I was distracted and never quite go to the “planting” part of the garden) and the dogs tore down the fence and then tore up the are. It was a cute garden but I don’t love it. It’s taking up a large part of the yard and honestly I don’t have the commitment to actually make it a vegetable garden. If I’m going to be mucking around with gardening I’d prefer it be raised. Realistically we’d need to come up with something to keep the dogs out of it. So we’ve decided to reclaim the garden back to the yard. Fearghus is going to be starting on this tomorrow. There’s a lot of things that need to happen for this but we’re both committed to making it happen.
Backyard and Horseshoe pit
Removing the garden means we’ll have to mess with the sprinklers and move the garden spigot out of the middle of the yard. We also have decided to tear down the playhouse. We’d prefer for Erik to have something different and the play house is starting to show its age. Finally we’ll have to replant grass and get it back to being a usable yard. At this time we plan to add sprinklers to the side yard and get grass to grow around the horse shoe pit.
Goodness. I’m tired just looking at this.