Yard and Garden – 2021

Welp, it was a BEAUTIFUL summer and fall…minus the fact that Mother Nature turned my favorite month (July) into a rain fest. But we sure accomplished a lot this year.

Back in May, I was already whining about feeling overloaded. Should I waste a few hundred words on why? If yes, continue. If NO, click HERE…no hard feelings:

We were just about to add a new puppy to the family.

I was getting a house ready to be put on the market.

And there was so much more to come:
-Doschious and doggo were moving back home (into our boys’ old room which needed sanding and repainting (note to self: no more striped walls).
-We had eight ash trees removed (after deciding a few years ago to stop treating them for ash borer) which left huge mounds of wood chips and dirt where the trees once stood.
-The blending of an old dog, a new puppy and an old puppy was not the instantly charming convergence shown on all the cute puppy pictures you see on-line.

-My sweet mom had a cardiac scare that required investigation, two procedures, and–fortunately–a positive outcome.
-We had some major HVAC issues.  Stay what you want about Buffalo winters.  Buffalo summers are toasty!

And then there were the projects (not including recovering my kitchen chairs).

A reasonable person might say, “Hey, Bickersons…the plate seems pretty full this summer. Perhaps you should save the projects until next year.”

And to that, we would reply, “Naaaah! What fun would that be?!”  What’s a little more tension for two already tightly-wrapped people.

First up…complete the sidewalk around the yard.

 

(Wait. Why do you have a sidewalk around the yard?)

We wanted a sidewalk because otherwise most of our backyard would be unusable for 9.5 months of the year, Like muddy and sloppy unusable. We moved here for the yard; not being able to use it without boots was a pretty major disappointment. 

Finding someone who’s a) interested in putting a sidewalk in your yard and b) available to fit you into their schedule is a “little” challenging. From a budgetary end, we installed the existing sidewalk in stages…and had completed one entire side of the yard as of the fall of 2017.

Since then, we’ve been bumped off multiple schedules by multiple contractors, so we decided that the next time we found one who was able and willing, we’d just finish it. The contractor we found said his crew was, indeed, able and willing.

Able? For sure.

Willing? I would say he was willing to promise they could do what we wanted, but it turned out that his crew was not willing to do it without every day from the first day forward being a fight. I’ll spare you a retelling. The walkway is finished, the final product is disappointing, we ended up having to redo a lot of the work ourselves and we’ve moved on to making lemonade from the lemons the crew left behind..

Part of the lemonade resulted in me privately using variations of a once-forbidden word WAAAAAY too often. Not very classy or attractive for someone my age, I know. I will attempt to put that demon back in its cage…but it sure did help me release some frustration.

Now…on to the DIY….

Do you happen to remember our two-level stacked stone wall adventure?  

Well, we doubled it and extended it to the property line, duplicating the plantings from the first part.

And the privacy trellises we put up two years ago?

We finally trimmed out the area with leftover stones from the tiered walls, added lots o’soil, and planted some Knock Out roses to give it a more finished look (and offer the deer a nice winter snack).

We also redesigned the area Mr has nicknamed “Birch Cove.”  Ringed with river birches, it’s a little sitting area made of loose screenings that we had planted in the back corner of the yard.

Mr thinks someday it will be a cool tunnel under the trees.  It also offers a little privacy screen, even though the people who live behind us couldn’t be nicer.  

But now, the screenings have been topped off with a permanent surface and we filled more of the area with soil and topped it with long pine needles.

We also finally took out my raspberry patch,

which had become overgrown and will be relocated somewhere near the “kitchen orchard” (currently in progress…

and is a post for another day).

The berry patch is now another sitting area…

because in Mr’s world one can never have enough sitting areas (which is pretty ironic since the man. never. sits.).

I planted white Annabelle Hydrangeas around the back of that space… even though Allie thought they would be nice to occasionally dig out and deliver to me for replanting.  There will also be two tiers of annuals in the front, and we gave it a dry run this summer… (better pictures next year, haha).

And then there were flowers.  After last year, when we shied away from stores due to paralyzing fear of contracting “IT,” we returned to the nursery in full force and loaded up on our staple red begonias.  

They covered the entire berm we put in a couple years ago, which went from this:

to this:

to this:

Somewhat finally, we resculpted the area around the chess garden.  Considering our near eligibility for the Senior Citizen discount, we’re looking at ways to minimize weekly lawn maintenance.  Let me just say, that weekly trimming around those angles was unfun…and mowing them was blade damaging.

 

So we sculpted soft mowable curves…and then took advantage of the maintenance respite…by planting eight million flats of red and white begonias. Yes, I know.  We traded one maintenance task for another…but it did look beautiful.  

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If it turns out there’s a begonia shortage next year…were Effed. (Damn. that’s a quarter for the cuss jar.  Damn, two quarters!  

Crap, this potty mouth is going to cost me a fortune!  I’ll have to put it towards next year’s projects.  (I think there’s a butterfly garden in my future!)