Yard updates, before and after… SO much grass!

My gosh do we have grass! Now I know I’ve been quite crabby about everything that went on in the yard the past year or so. Losing the barn, the front yard tree, having to put in a new septic system and losing my horse too. The guys we hired to install are new septic last year came back to black dirt and seed our yard this spring. (Its required to code on all new septic systems.) They came nearly a month earlier than we were expecting and just a week after we lost our front yard tree. It was good they came early but I sure did complain here to you guys about how I was so sick of everything happening so fast…

One thing went incredibly right for us after they finished the lawn.

PERFECT WEATHER.

BEYOND PERFECT.

SHOCKINGLY PERFECT!

It rained every couple of days for several weeks. It was never too hot but we got lots of sun so we didn’t have to water our yard once.

We’ve been in a drought for YEARS.

The weather felt like a miracle!

Lodi and I had been fully prepared to have to water our huge yard almost daily for weeks which would have been a couple of hours every night moving sprinklers around.

Not something I was looking forward to doing after work every day!

My gosh our yard just exploded. We have so much grass now its shocking and so wonderful to see as it had been a pretty ugly stretch of dirt since last year.

Lodi loves to mow but now I think he’s fully on board with my tree planting idea to cut out an acre or two of grass… With the horse pasture gone now too is is ALOT now to maintain.

It was his first goal (and purchase) for the farm that first summer he moved in with me. I didn’t own a lawn mower (or even a weed whacker) of any kind.

I had let my lawn go to seed consistently…

Something about an unkempt lawn really bothers some people lol.

My best friend’s husband actually came by and literally tackled my lawn one day when I was at work because he just couldn’t STAND it anymore.

I like a nice mown lawn… but clearly not enough to actually mow it. Its something I’ve accepted about myself and also something I paid my nephews to do a couple of times a year back when I was here alone.

(I feel like I paid my dues after having mown 6 days a week every summer for ten years at my parents’ golf course… I’ve joked that if I never have to cut another blade of grass again it would be too soon!)

Paying my nephews was a lot less costly than buying a mower so I didn’t see it as me not being frugal or lazy at all. (And they’re all great kids who I was glad to support.)

I don’t think Lodi had even lived here for 6 months when he sent me a picture of a brand new lawn mower and the caption, “So I did a thing.”

He was fully aware of my stance when it came to cutting grass and knew he was taking the yard maintenance on as his and his alone…

No need to ask an obvious question: YES I miss my garden SO MUCH this year as I knew I would.

But the dreams and hopes of what I’ll have by next year is keeping me going!

They sell dog “kennels” at Menards for about $350 in a sleek black fencing that’s six feet tall. Two of them would give us a 10×20 garden and two gates.

Kind of loving the idea…

I would put 1ftx20ft raised beds down either side for climbing veggies and a 3ftx14ft “island” in the center for root vegetables and squash. They would all be about counter top height.

Initially I wanted to pour a slab and build our garden out of bricks and pavers… but I’m thinking about going a bit lighter weight initially so I can move it if I want to after seeing how it goes the first year.

And maybe make it bigger too if I feel like it!

But building anything out of concrete and block is NOT fun and I keep running into steel raised beds all over the internet and then all I would have to do is literally set them in place, fill them with dirt and plant something.

Something under foot is mandatory so we don’t have to mow or weed inside of the garden at all… which has me a bit befuddled…

Yes a slab would work great for years and years… but do I really WANT to pour more concrete out here?

We literally just spent a FORTUNE taking out truck loads upon truck loads of the insane amount of concrete that had been under the barn…

Our pea gravel lower deck cost only about $300 and is working well for us… and we wouldn’t have to do near the work up here that we had to do for our lower deck.

Or, even easier, I could set my fence in place, throw done some thick pond plastic (held down by the fence) and then just cover it in rubber mulch… and be totally done… that’s looking like a better idea by the minute!

Once our garden is in place for good I eventually want to fence in a large portion around the garden to plant for butterflies, bees, bunnies etc. That (and the garden) will be eliminating a lot of grass to mow and give me the sanctuary I want out here.

The “sanctuary garden” will not be mowed and when I say fenced in I really mean something basic and inexpensive to provide a line, not keep anything out or in – maybe just a basic two panel ranch fence or a little picket. (That’s well into the future of course!)

I can’t wait to transplant all of my peonies on the South side in front of our new garden. They’re making it where they are but they are desperate for full sun and I will FINALLY have the perfect place for them!

And won’t they be a lovely hedge blooming, welcoming me to the garden every spring?