The Yard is a Yard is a Yard…

The backyard is what brought us to the conclusion that this small little house would be perfect for us. Nigra loves the outside, and, look! It's already landscaped nicely. 

Let's buy it, okay?

And then, the first summer commences, and we have no clue what we were getting ourselves into. The man who lived here before us planted wildflowers, and those wildflowers died and turned into a massive infestation of weeds. The kind that are out for blood.

"Feed me, Seymour!"

Luckily, as the years have continued, we've been able to kill off most of the hateful weeds. The next order of business is the mulching. The backyard is sectioned off, but it takes so much mulch to make it look satisfactory and for us to do a good job and layer the mulch thick. 

In order to mulch this summer, we had to weed, and weed, and weed. The problem with that is this: the weather has been unbearably hot, so going outside would cause heat stroke. Then, we can't forget to mention the insane amounts of rain and thunderstorms we've been having, for a while on a daily basis. Next, let's add humidity. Put all those elements into a blender on high and you'll get a yard that's overgrown in places because we haven't been able to keep up with it. 

Some of the weeds, we call rhubarb, are these tall meaty beasts that hide themselves in the pine tree and the neighbor's tree/bush that invades our yard. They were as tall as me. We had to use limb cutters in order to cut them down, and they crunched and fell to the ground. So gross. Weeds are so alien-looking to me. 

Also, from our trees, we've got the whirly-gig seedlings that plant more trees throughout our yard. Now, I'm all for planting trees, but when Nature decides to do it for me...I get a little testy. If Nature talked to me about where I wanted the trees, that would be different, but you see, Nature is a terrible landscape architect. Really, we've got plenty of trees already...

Another force of Nature that was against us were the mosquitoes. We believe some of their relatives are in "Eclipse" and they were pestering Steph because she refuses to read or see "Twilight." They swarmed and molested us. 

We have put in almost 20 hours this week just trying to get the yard back to normal and mulched. 

Then, we ran out of mulch...so, we're not entirely done...yet.