Stupid Yard

I have a definitely love/hate relationship with my yard.

Sometimes I really wish we had a big yard, like my parents yard or like the house we almost bought.

Sometimes I wish we just had grass because I hate everything else. That is actually pretty much all the time because although grass is work in itself, it's only one thing. Even my limited gardening knowledge can mostly take care of grass.

Let me give you a detailed tour of what I do and don't like in our yard and what I would like to do about it.

This first one isn't really the growing part, but Freya decided during the monsoons to start pooping under the deck, and has continued ever since. At first I thought it wouldn't be terrible because then the grass is better, but no, it really sucks to crawl under there to pick it all up. My hands and knees are VERY unhappy with her. So we went to home depot to get lattice to start putting that up.

 Here is the garden area. Obviously we don't weed that very well, but we figure when we actually do the garden next year, we will have all new soil anyways. We will put a fence around the garden part so the dogs don't get to it.

We have some really strange plants growing along the rock path to the garden. I want to get rid of the plants and put grass in in place of the rocks. I really want more grass and I feel like it will add more yard in a good way and give more space for chillins and dogs to run around. My mom said to keep in mind if we wanted to do a play house or something for the kids, this would be a good area, but I feel like that would be a long while from now and I don't think we would necessarily want it in this corner, so we might as well have more grass while we can.

This is the grass in the back yard. You can see that it is spotty and not very thick. When you look at the wider view (second picture) it doesn't look too terrible, and parts of it are alright, but it is kind of lumpy and where it isn't think it feels almost muddy. That is why I want to resod it because I feel it would be more effective then trying to seed it.

Here are the plants along the deck. The flowers on the left are really pretty irises, so I like those and will keep those. The plants on the right are marigolds. When we first moved in, there were no marigold plants at all, and they have taken over! Ares, the new puppy, loves playing in them so that has ruined them, but we definitely don't want to keep them after this year anyways, so that works.

What we do love are the trees. We have two apple trees in the backyard. Red delicious apple trees. Apparently you need to have two so they can pollinate, which we have. I think we have four apples on our bigger tree. My cousin who is a horticulture graduate and works at a nursery says that if we spray the tree for insects at the beginning of the year, we will get more apples. They are still pretty little, but they will get big.

Next to the smaller apple tree and next to the deck we have some another flower bed. I like these flowers for the most part. I will be getting rid of the potted plant along with the rest of the potted everythings. We will also need to re-woodchip everything including this area. Depending on how we decide to redo the deck, this area may be taken over by the deck a little since we want to move the stairs to the other side.

 Here is a cute little froggie/toad that was in the yard while I was taking pictures.

 There is this area by our patio that is not part of the patio. Right now it has some pots, which I think I will keep these ones, but probably not use them for awhile. I asked Dylan what he wanted to do with this area and he said maybe put a table area for setting stuff out for eating. Not a bad idea.

 I also really like our side area. Simple, but it makes it really easy to move the mower in and out. I love the doggie door stairs too.

These two plants were on the front porch. I could never remember to water them and I really didn't like them anyways. They will go out with the trash tomorrow morning. :)

This is a view of the rest of the trash. The previous owner had this big leaved plant thing that was mostly dead on the side of the house and then a couple of plastic hanging pots with dead plants that I am throwing out as well. Like I said, not a flower/plant person. Most everything else can be reached by the sprinkler system.

In the front yard, I have a couple things I do and don't like as well. One thing I do like is these bushes along the left side. They are low maintenance and make a decent barrier in the yard. As for the potted plants in front of the bushes, I like them overall, but I need to be better about watering them.

One of the plants we both do not like are these purple flowers along the right side of the front yard. They just grow everywhere and are huge. Then this weekend while Dylan was doing the yard he realized there were a ton of honeybees on the flowers, so now he feels bad about wanting to get rid of them. I don't know what we would put there instead, but they either need a lot more maintenance or they need to go. And I think by now you know how I feel about maintenance.

Here are the flower beds in the front. The bottom tier is more freaking marigolds. We will have to replace the soil in these in hopes they don't come back next year. The top looks good though.

 Oh look! Pretty flowers :) I like these too! These just bloomed this week.

This is the tree we have in the front. I actually overall really like the way this is landscaped. I like the rocks and the plants around the tree and along the sidewalk.

The last picture is the of our grass in front. It definitely gets a lot of water, so I think a lot of the issue is that the previous owner sucked at lawn care.  I think we can get this to fill in though.

That is the rather thorough tour of our yard and my varied opinions on all of it. We were waiting to see what came up this year and will actually make changes next year. It is definitely going to be a work in progress.