View from hill in May 09

(scroll down to Dec 07 entry to see the same view in Sept07)

May09 Back Garden

The back garden is filling in little by little....(gotta love how slow shade gardens grow!!)

A little garden

It's nothing spectacular, but I did manage to put one small garden in this summer...
Behind Henry's play area. He and his friend Roni were playing in the sandbox one day and I was pulling a few weeds. I noticed a pile of rocks that we hadn't done anything with yet and was looking for something to do. Before I knew it I had started a little rock wall and had plans for a simple low maintenance shade garden. Voila! We're going to continue the river rock the rest of the way around the play area to make mowing a bit easier...then take it from there.

Itching to garden

We haven't done much planting yet b/c we have plans to paint the house (though, it didn't happen this summer....too much rain and not enough money....!!!). BUT...once upon a time, a gardener must have lived here because we have a rhodie, lilac, forsythia and this huge honeysuckle...as well as a great bunch of spectacular peony, these awesome orange poppy and some lilies & irises. I can't wait to get to work!

View From Front

Here are a few pictures from the front of the house. We have our bird houses up on the posts and the arbor mostly finished...we still need to finish trimming the arbor then get it all painted (fence & arbor....and the whole house. UGH!)

Need some sympathy from my west coast friends...

This picture was taken at THE END OF APRIL!!! Can you believe it?! We had one lone hyacinth bloom. CRAZY. This is taking some getting used to (and ALOT of whining!)

Random Pics & Notes

Once the walkway was in...the Wagstaff brothers came up for a weekend to help us with our back porch. The intention was to re-roof the porch...should have taken a few hours. I came out at some point during the process and the porch roof was ripped apart and the clapboards from the 2nd story were MIA. Hmmmm...turns out the roof was in worse shape than we realized so the boys decided to redo the whole thing...and The clapboards, well, like almost everything our previous 'handyman' did...were done the lazy way. The put a new window in (yea!) but did a shoddy job of replacing the clapboards so it was easier for the boys to remove all of that mess and start over!

Then it was on to completing the front walkway/retaining wall. We decided to do the front walk/retaining wall last so that we could more easily get the wheelbarrow full of stone up the hill and into the yard. We initially were just going to put pavers down...but it was so close to the edge of the hill we were worried about slipping down the hill. Would have loved to have a full retaining wall done from the street but it would have cost us $1200-1500 just to have it done in wood and who knows how much to have it done in stone (what I would have wanted!).

In Sept. we finally put the arch top on above the gate. WOO HOO! My father-in-law built this for me (Thanks Dad!) We still have to finish trimming it out...add the birdhouses on the fence posts and paint the fence white but that will have to wait until next sumer!

Oh yeah...we also get to scrape and paint the house next summer. Won't THAT be fun!

I'm hoping to get started on a bit of landscaping too! I'm itching to get my garden going! I did manage to revive the rhodie this summer and prune the lilac and honeysuckle (that's the big
tree in the yard). Henry loves to get his fingers in the dirt too...and grab WORMS!