The “Last Frontier” (AKA The Back Forty, The Bottom, The Holler)

It’s been on the to-do list since we bought this house:  “Make plans to clear out back line of property for a sunny vegetable garden”.  The back line of our property is 80 feet of overgrown honeysuckle, briars, saplings and weeds woven into an impenetrable wall of green, reminiscent of Maleficent’s forest of thorns.  It is situated beyond the wood line, in full sun and backs up to a small stream—perfect for a garden.  In a yard full of shade, this area is a land of sun and possibility!  A land into which we must finally venture, thorns or no thorns.

After six years of looking longingly at our back woods with hopes of “someday” clearing it out for a garden, we finally pulled the trigger!  Last weekend my mother rented a Bobcat mini excavator and my brother John came and drove it down through the woods and into the wild frontier!

Slow and steady work… scraping, pushing, digging… until a small space cleared became a big space!

John even pushed over a couple of pine trees and then tore up the root and carried them away with the claw part of the machine.  :)  So much faster than cutting them up.

And at my request he saved this little water oak tree for me!  Someday it will be a lovely shade tree for our lower yard!  I love my little tree!

The property runs right up to a little creek in the back.  It’s charming. :)  Also, Riley loves it.  She takes every opportunity to run down the bank and splash in the water.  Then she goes tearing around through the dirt until she is filthy!

Now that it’s all cleared out, we have to till, rake, and clean up the roots and rocks and stumps before we can put in rows of vegetables, a swath of grass and some flower beds.  Plus we have to clean up the woods and add a little pathway so you can safely reach the gate.  Lots of work to be done down here! :)  Can’t wait to show you more results! 

And since it has officially been cleared out, the “bottom/last frontier” shall now be called “the garden” or “the lower yard”.  Now that you are up to date on the lingo… here is your before and after comparison… what a change!

Thanks Mama and John for all your hard work! :)

Curb Appeal

In a recent post I was lamenting the fact that we haven’t yet won “Yard of the Week” and I surmised that this is because of the derelict state of our parking space at the top of the yard.  Who wants a parking space in their yard anyway?  Well, I don’t, but we have one and since our garage is one-car only and the driveway is super steep, it is a convenient place to park our second car.  The former owners filled the space with crushed red brick/gravel and outlined it with big rocks.  Last year we enlarged the space so two cars could fit there without squishing the grass.  At that time we removed all the rocks that edged the smaller space.  We planned to edge the new, larger space with bricks to create a nice uniform edge to hold the gravel in place and keep it from rolling into the grass.
We finally got around to accomplishing this last week.  Granted, we still lack 72 bricks to finish the end, but I am impatient and wanted to share!  Of course, this improvement is all because of my Mama!  Although Papa provided the bricks (or perhaps we stole them from his stash!) Mama loaded them and brought them to my house, then unloaded them.  She dug out all the sod from the edge (with mattock and shovel), leveled the ground and put each brick in place.  I helped by measuring the width, weeding, hauling bricks and discarded sod.  Oh and I took pictures… my specialty!


Here’s what it looked like before we got started:

After we reseeded the front yard last fall, the “edge” of the space totally deteriorated so we had to dig out a lot of grass.

But after several hours of digging and hauling we were still not done… haha!  But we only quit because we ran out of bricks.  So, here is the almost completed project:




All we need now (in addition to the remaining bricks) is some more brick gravel to fill in the space.  And maybe pull a few more weeds. ;)  Then it will be all fresh and clean looking!

I also mentioned in my post of yore that I was planning to add salvia to my front flower bed.  I finally found my salvia specimens at Walmart and I got five of them to fill in the space behind the pink verbena.  While I was there I also bought six pink perennial dianthus to go in between the verbena, so hopefully (if voles don’t eat them) they will come back next year and I won’t need annuals for color in this bed.
Voila!






It looks so much nicer now… hopefully some certain committee members notice, too! ;)  Stay tuned!

Happiness is a pink peony…

My peonies are blooming… and for once I have more than two blooms!  I have five peony bushes in the yard and for the first time since we planted them five years ago they are all producing flowers! 

These two came from the same bush but they are two different shades of pink! :) 

While I was out photographing my peonies, I took some other garden shots for you.

Purple and white bearded iris:

Plum iris:

Evening primrose:

Knockout roses:

The pink knockout positively glows at dusk:

I just can’t get enough spring blooms! :)  Stay tuned for more garden updates!

Flower Power

I have long been in the quest for “Yard of the Week” from our local beautification committee.  Even before I knew there was such a thing in our community, we joked about winning this award.  So, in my continued effort to make my yard better and prettier each year, I planted a bunch of annuals this past week. 

In previous years I had pink impatiens along the front walk.  They always did great and grew really big.  But they were constantly wilting in the summer heat and I had to water them every day.  Last year I decided to try petunias.  They were all eaten by something (evil pests!) or they died from lack of sun.  There were no flowers.  It was a landscape tragedy!  So this year, in the search for a pretty, drought/heat tolerant, and shade loving flower I selected begonias to be the star of my front yard.  While these plants don’t like full sun (well hello friend, and welcome to MY YARD!) they have thick waxy leaves which supposedly help prevent water loss during hot summers.  We’ll see.  In true Sarah fashion, I bought hot pink and light pink begonias with green leaves.  They also come in “bronze leaf” variety, but I prefer the green ones.  Although according to Google, the brown leaf variety can tolerate more sun. 

I planted them every foot or so along the walk, alternating light and dark pink:

While I was at it, I put in some bright pink verbena in the mailbox bed.  I even moved the last of the liriope out so the annuals would continue uninterrupted along the edge. 

I love this plant… the little daisy like flowers grow in a circular cluster.  Aren’t they cheerful?  And you can’t beat that pop of pink! :)

I usually neglect this area because it’s too hard to drag the water hose up here… and that’s probably why we don’t win Yard of the Week.  It’s the only flower bed you can see unless you crane your neck down the hill as you are driving by to glimpse the rest of the yard.  Hope those beautification committee members are driving slowly by my house!! :) 

To make up for my past failings, this year we are sprucing up the mailbox bed.  I planted a second knockout rose bush on the other side of the mailbox and of course my new cherry tree.  I just need to move some other things around to fill in those blank spaces.  I’ve also got plans to clean up the “parking space” at the top of the yard.  Now that we have nice grass, this is another spot that is holding us back from being an award-winning yard. 

I’m also planning to put blue salvia in between the pink verbena.  I think that will complete the look!  And it will coordinate with the purple clematis on the mailbox. 

In addition to the flower beds, I also got my flower baskets back on the fence.  Like last year I again filled them with coleus, New Guinea impatiens, and lime sweet potato vine. 

The magenta impatiens (these are actually “sunpatiens” which have been bred to survive better in the sun, not that I have that problem!) aren’t all flowering just yet, so I’ll keep you posted on their progress.  Last year this same combo got so big I couldn’t keep them watered, so this year I upgraded to a bigger basket.  It looks kind of empty now, but don’t worry, it will fill in!  That coleus is called “Chocolate Cherry.”  Yummy!  :)

I rounded out my flower shopping trip with a few ferns for the back deck and the front porch.  Ferns are about the only thing I can keep alive under there. :)  That is, if I remember to water them…

Looks pretty good… the easy part is over, now onto the hard part: keeping it looking this good all summer!  :)Thanks for stopping by, if you need me I’ll be in the yard pruning, weeding or watering something…