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!