Gardening Annually

So.... my yard was looking pretty shabby. Now the inside of my house is approaching "showplace," but the outside has been neglected. I had read that when you move into a new place, you really shouldn't do any landscaping until you've been there a year so that you'll know how your garden looks throughout the seasons. I took "no landscaping" to mean "no yard maintenance." I mean, yeah, I mowed it when I felt overwhelmingly embarrassed, but I haven't planted anything new.

Well, I've been wanting to put a planting bed around the mailbox. I thought it would add to the curb appeal (it would also make it easier to mow that area of the yard). I planned to work on that yesterday, but I got distracted by the planting beds in front of the house. I focused my attention to cleaning them up - they probably hadn't been touched for the four or five months before I bought the house. So now after about 18 months the time was right.



So, 7 hours, 13 bags of debris, 3 armfuls of branches, and 1600 mg of Motrin (in two doses, six hours apart) later, the planters in front of my house were cleaned out. A third of the shrubbery was dead - one side of the house has only three little plants left in front of it.



The pictures really don't do justice to the excruciating amount of work I did, it just occurred to me to show a pic of the front of the house - too late tonight.

At one point I got a little excited because I found this black and metallic tube-like object. I thought it might be some sort of Ancient Klingon Time Capsule or The Cosmic Key (raise your hand if you saw He-Man and the Masters of the Universe - the live action movie, starring Dolph Lundgren and Courtney Cox - I'll let you borrow my DVD if you promise to bring it back). No, it wasn't a Cosmic Key, a Klingon Time Capsule, or even a toy lightsaber - it was a stupid ole' broken bird-feeder (which was promptly disposed of in bag #12).