After 3 years of neglect, the weed monsters had moved into my yards with a vengeance bringing weeds up to my knees and shrubs made out of tree root suckers. It was kind of intimidating, but like Mom always said, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Here's what I was dealing with.
doesn't necessarily look so bad from a distance but everything in that flower bed is wild. My first task was to get rid of all of the overgrowth. Three years of it and this was only half of what I removed.
But I pressed on. My husband had said if I got all of the basic gardening and lawn care done, we could level the patio (at my request) and so I just kept the end goal in view, hunkered down and kept on going. One of the problems in the yard was there was a "bush" in the corner that looked suspiciously like the maple tree in the middle of the yard. I have a Nan King Cherry on the south end of the yard that I thought would look better than the overgrown maple so started digging. I forgot to take a picture with the gaping hole, but suffice it to say that six feet across and three feet down is not as easy as it sounds. It took me most of the day on Saturday to get it out, but eventually I did. When I got it out, lo and behold, it wasn't just an overgrown maple bush. It was a choked out Nan King Cherry. That's it in the picture behind me.
I pulled all of the maple roots and weeds out from around the root ball, washed it off and got ready to re-plant it. This was the pile of maple roots that were choking the cherry.
And this was the cherry back in its home with all of the weeding complete.
I can honestly say when you are going to do a project like this, it isn't wise to schedule running club and yoga on the same day, though by taking it easy at all of them, I wasn't in TOO much pain when I went to bed.
Sunday morning I got up early and started puttering. I finished all of the weeding in my vegetable garden bed before we left for Father's Day golf at Sylvan Lake. We got back too late for me to do any work on it before bed so I got to bed early and started planting early Monday morning (no work due to changeover YAY!!). By 9:30am I had finished planting what I had for seeds. Hopefully I got all of the instructions right and will soon have fresh grown food to eat.
All in all, I feel really good about finishing and sticking to a project. The yard is now ready for entertaining so if anyone wants to come break in my patio, let me know. I'll probably post again when we finish levelling it. Ta ta for now!!
