An Accomplished Day

Today was a beautiful day.  Buddy is on his Spring Break so I have been trying to keep him busy with this and that.  Yesterday, I promised we would go on an Adventure through the woods across the street.  After breakfast this morning we grabbed our backpacks filled with adventure necessities like binoculars and sticks and little toy animals, water bottles, and a camera.  We put on our hiking shoes and headed out the door.  As we stepped outside, who shows up, home early from work?  None other than Hubby!  Hooray!  He decided to join us on our Adventure.  Hooray!  He also chooses this time to bring the dog and do a little leash training...probably not the best idea, but it was noble :)  Away we go on our Adventure, through the woods, gathering twigs, rocks, nuts on our way for Buddy to use for making habitats.... I forgot to mention that he is very much into making habitats since he made one for his snake at school.  In a day or two we will make clay animals and daddy will bring home boxes for his habitats to go in.  We spent a nice amount of time on our Adventure and headed home nice and tired.  After sitting down inside, tired, hubby and I decided to go ahead and start working some more on the front yard, weeding and planting bulbs....yes, we were tired, and yes it was lunch time, sounds like the perfect time for yard work...right?

Our front yard has been a disaster for quite a while.  The problem being that the previous owners did a terrible job with "landscaping" and we did a terrible job at watering and trimming so some things died other things are over grown etc etc.  Then not to mention the fact that we randomly added fruit plants to the front.  Our cat died 2 Octobers ago, so make the healing process easier for the kids we decided to buy a plant to put in his spot.  Well, once at home depot, we could not decide on what to get that would last, then we saw the blueberry bush and also a blackberry bush and couldn't decide on 1 so we went with both.  Those got planted too close together as they HAD to be on top of Marlow, then we planted the peach tree that we were given several months before that in a random spot.  A few months later, we got an apple tree, 2 cherry trees and some bamboo and planted all of that.  I must admit that I don't have a landscaping eye, and things were planted kind of oddly around the front yard.  Then there's the part right in front of our house.  It just looks retarded.  There was a rosemary bush on one end that I loved but died this past winter.  3 random bushes planted too closely together and untrimmed, then a span of about double that area that had nothing but weeds growing and then a magnolia bush at the very end of the house.  Yes, I will be the first to admit that the front of our house looked RETARDED!  Why haven't we done anything about it?  Well, the final plan for our house will take many many years to come to a realization.  I want a nice covered front porch to stretch the length of the house.  Then I want steps to come from the middle of the porch into the front yard.  Then I want the entire front yard to be an overgrown garden oasis, with paths, cute little sitting areas, a little bridge going over the ditch to the mailbox.  Tons of plants, and flowers, random art, birdbaths, etc, etc etc.  So the problem is, why plant things when they will have to be taken up when we build this???  So we were stuck, what do we do?  Well, B noticed lots of bulbs at costco that were cheap, and grew in the shade and would hopefully be good land cover to keep away the weeds.

Friday, the bulbs were purchased, now the motivation to do something was in need.  So, as I said earlier, the perfect time was after we were tired from our Adventure.  We headed outside with the kids and started pulling weeds...TONS-OF-WEEDS.  After getting all of the weeds pulled, as well as massive crazy random huge roots and the bushes, we started planting.  Lots of holes were dug and lots of bulbs were planted.  We did elephant ears up against the house and then some tall growing red flowers in front of that.  More bulbs will need to be purchased...(does anyone ever buy enough bulbs the first time??)  I need to do more research on good shade loving plants to put there.  Hopefully it will get to the point where pretty plants will sprout up through out the year.  Anything grow in winter?  The bushes that were still alive were planted along the side of the driveway, because we can't kill plants that don't die from lack of love and attention...those are needed by people like us.  Finishing with all of that and time moving into the middle of the afternoon, I prepared a nice picnic lunch and we all sat in the front lawn relaxing and enjoying the fruits of our labor, tired and hungry.  We spent quite a while laying out and the kids picked tons of flowers.  B took a nice nap.

After dinner, I went back out and removed the massive piles of weeds that had formed in the yard.  I was going to compost them, but that would require opening the gate to the back yard and keeping the crazy dog contained...not on my to do list for this year.  So I opted for filling in the random huge holes that had formed on the side of the house.

I can't wait till the bulbs start growing!  We still need more bulbs and mulch.  But we are well on our way. Yay!  The best thing about bulbs is they are easy to relocate when the time comes :)

How was your day?  Did you get to enjoy this beautiful weather?  It was just what a spring day is supposed to feel like.