Another weekend of yardwork

Even though we had family in town and staying with us, we still somehow managed to get a ton of yardwork done!


I decided that I was going to rip out the ugly, dead, ornamental grasses that were planted in the front of the house, and that I did.  Ariane came out and supervised then helped me throw them away.  After that, I started looking at all the trimming we needed to do on the tree in the front yard.  It's a big ash tree that's probably about 30 years old -- and it looked like it hadn't been trimmed for a few years.  There was a big branch hanging down over the front walkway and the whole underside of each limb had a bunch of dead branches hanging off of it.  Didn't look good.

So, I immediately began trimming the tree in the front yard with my shovel.  That's right, just swinging it back and forth, trying to knock off some dead branches!   It didn't work that well.

Luckily for us, our neighbor from across the street was already walking over with his tree pruner pole, pretty much asking us to borrow it!   So we did and cut down a whole bunch of tree.  We even managed to cut down a limb that was probably 10" in diameter that was hanging over our other neighbor's roof!

The big limb we cut off.

Piling the limbs up.

As the branches started to pile up and we started to worry about what we'd do with all these branches, our across the street neighbor shows up again and offers his truck to us!  He said we could load it up and take all those branches over to the recycling center, where they turn it into mulch.  We of course accepted and did just that with the help of my brother.

Gotta say that tree looks way cleaner now and it's nice to not have to duck when walking to the front door!

Much better.

The next day, after my mom and brother ended their stay with us, we went to buy up plants and soil.  We originally wanted to buy plants to fill up that right side of the front of the house (when you're looking at it from the above angle) and then a few plants for the garden.  We already had a few plants that Ariane's mom had given us, including tomatoes, peppers, mint and chives, but we felt like we needed more already.

That right side of the house is just looking kind of empty and unplanned, and we don't like that look at all:

Right side with lots of strawberry ground cover, and dirt.

We ended up coming back with hardly anything for that right side other than a couple of hostas, although they were only $4.99 each.

Hosta 1.

Hosta 2.

 We did get some geraniums (10 for $10) and a lamb's ears plant for the left side that we didn't really need, but do look good.

Line of geraniums.

 We put the lamb's ear plant just in the middle of the front part of the bed -- so we can touch it when we walk by!

Lamb's ears hopefully will get way bigger.

We also managed to get more tomatoes (which we didn't need) and some basil for the garden in the backyard.  We planted the basil with the flat parsley in the trapezoid containers which will serve as our herb containers.  The chives went in the middle one, while carrots are still on the left one (who knows why). 

From left: chives, basil, and flat parsley.

Chocolate mint, well contained.

 The cauliflower and broccoli are still going strong in the rectangle container, and we got a couple of cucumber starts that were actually about 10 plants total.  When I got ready to plant them I couldn't get the roots apart without ripping the crap out of them, so we just planted them together -- about 5 each.  That should do it, huh!  They are in between the zucchini and brocolli/cauliflower.

From left: zucchini, cucumber, broccoli and cauliflower.

After we laid out all of the tomatoes is of course when we realized that we had too many.  I think we already had 6 or so seedlings, then 4 starts from Ariane's mom.  Add the three we got from the nursery and we've got WAY too many.  So, we planted what we could in the area we had planned for (left side of the hexagon), and then put the three we got from the nursery directly in the ground.  That was a pain since the ground is just the terrible Colorado clay ... and it was under rocks!  They might be hardy enough to survive but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

The three tomatoes in the ground.

Ariane also moved some of the onion starts to the right rectangle planter, behind the beans. 

The Hexagon and the two rectangle planters.  Not as scary as the Octagon.

Did you notice that lettuce on the right side of the hexagon!  It is doing AWESOME!  We started that from seed and then transplanted it into the hexagon about a month ago, and it's really growing now that it's getting warmer!  I have been taking a picture of it every day for a little over a week, and you can see the growth -- check it out: