Now the Yard

Maybe I should take a picture of the "before" so you (well, me too) can see the difference when it is finished. It's our backyard I'm referring to. We decided to get rid of some lawn -- which really wasn't lawn anyway. It was more a patchwork of weeds and grassy clumps. Anyway, last summer Korak rototilled about half of our backyard so I could get the cottonwood tree roots out of it (the trees are gone so no worry about the roots returning). Since then it has produced a nice crop of the most interesting looking weeds. Now I have to digress a little and talk about the weather. For the last few weeks we have been having rain, then sun, then rain again, then a forecast for rain but maybe not, and throw some cold in there, and so on. It even snowed one morning -- not much, just a little bit. But this weekend --sun, warm, almost hot. Mid 70s for the temp which seems hot considering some of the temps we have had.

So back to the backyard. I was able to spray that nifty crop of weeds with Round-Up, dig up an old stump, and we hauled a trailer load of stuff to Jo-Grow. Oh, now I need to digress again. Jo-Grow is at the old landfill where we can take woody yard debris like grass clippings, limbs, vines, etc. They grind it up, mix it with fertilizer stuff, let it stew for awhile and then sell it back to the public as mulch. The "Jo" is short for Josephine -- the name of our county. The "Grow" comes from... I don't know what... maybe because it's supposed to be good for growing. So we borrowed a trailer, cleaned up a bunch of stuff in the yard, took it to Jo-Grow and brought back a trailer full of... well, Jo-Grow. Then I borrowed a little rototiller and prepared our old raised-bed garden to be the new raspberry patch -- with a little Jo-Grow thrown in. This meant digging out the old railroad ties and putting in new supports to hold the wires to hold up the little, slender bodies of the raspberry bush. All of this means, my body is sore. It seems I keep finding projects that make my muscles tired.

The rest of the project will follow in due order. While we were in Arizona we were impressed with the rock landscaping -- to be interpreted, "no lawns." So we are putting in a new raised-bed garden, some kind of rock design, some flower pots, shrubs of some sort, etc. Something like that. As you can see, it is very well thought out. Also, we are going to put in a hedge of something along the back of our property. The guy developing the property in the back says he is going to put up a fence but who knows when that will be. With the housing market the way it is, he may not build there for quite awhile. So we are going to plant something -- maybe photinia. Anybody know anything good or bad about using photinia as a backyard hedge?

There are things in our lives other than backyards. We volunteered to help Diana with Kids Klub each Wednesday evening. She has been doing it by herself or with help from a couple of middle schoolers. It was fun to be back with some of the kids we know and to meet a lot of new ones. Today we went to church at Calvary Chapel. They meet in a converted store down town on 7th. It was kind of odd to sit in church and watch cars go by on the street.

Well, you can tell it has been a rather low key week. Lots of work in store for the coming week if the weather permits. So what is in store for your week? Keep looking up.