The Grass is Always Greener in Somebody Else's Yard

So, the front yard. We're not really into the golf-course perfect lawn thing (good thing, as you'll see below), but we couldn't decide on much else to do with our small front yard besides plant grass. So over many (too many) months, we've been slowly transforming an oddly orderly group of bushes into something that resembles a yard. Sorta. This is the long-overdue post of our attempt. 

It used to look like this:

That's two million of the same purple bush. They really liked it here, so they got really overgrown. We finally decided we were sick of looking at them. Mature bushes like this would cost some actual money at a nursery, so we thought we were being rather generous when we posted on Craigslist and Freecycle that the plants were free to anyone who would come dig them up.

Oy. Nobody showed up when they said they would. Everybody wanted to tell you their life story related to why they didn't just show up when they said they would. People said they were too hard to dig up. People (repeatedly) asked us to dig them up for them. No. 

I think we successfully gave away 4 out of 12. The rest we dug up ourselves and put in the compost bin a couple a week. 

So, clean slate! Weedy slate, but clean slate. 

We decided to avoid dumping a truckload of round up on the yard, and we attempted a greener and uglier method weed killing. We got a couple of rolls of black plastic and hauled out some of the random paving stones we've found around the place. We left this lovely installation in place for a few weeks. 

When we pulled up the plastic, everything was dead. Hooray! Off we went to Home Depot to rent a tiller. After we out-smarted that pesky switch that opens the fuel line, we tilled away. 

Then, because even fancy grass needs water, we installed an irrigation system. Our knowledge of irrigation is pretty much like our knowledge of any of this other house nonsense - we read about it on the internet. Well, Devon read about it on the internet. I helped, because I really love PVC cement. Also, I love those handy ratcheting PVC scissors. (They're probably not actually called scissors.)

I am useful in the autocad stage of each project! Here's our diagram of where we needed to install sprinkler heads to cover the space. 

Digging trenches is no fun, but luckily the yard is small. Here is it tilled and trenched.  

We test-fit the whole system, and I think we only had to go to the hardware store once for additional T's and elbows and such. That's practically miraculous! Here's one of the sprinkler head locations.

The water connection is by the house, across the sidewalk from the yard. Devon found this handy nozzle thinger that you're supposed to use to drill under sidewalks. You attached it to a length of PVC and attach an adapter and garden hose to the other end. It's supposed to spray a strong enough jet of water that with a little muscle you can push the pipe under a sidewalk.

Seems like it should work, no? Yeah, it doesn't. At least, it doesn't work when your soil has so much clay that you could make pottery. One more trip to the hardware store, this time for a steel pipe and a sledge hammer. Here's Devon employing the improved brute force sidewalk drilling technique.

 Once we were through to the other side, we needed to hook the system up to the water supply. I happily cut and glued connectors and such for the pump:

And Devon was in charge of teflon-taping our new and improved hose and sprinkler valves:

Here's the whole mess assembled. The stub to the right is for a future additional irrigation zone to serve the landscaping. Eventually those geraniums will go away (I despise geraniums) and maybe we'll plant something to disguise this set-up a little.

  We cemented the whole system together. Doesn't it almost look like we knew what we were doing?

 We put the heads on and look! Water!

Fast forward to the next weekend - time to plant the grass. We ordered Buffalo Grass, which looks pretty and is fairly drought tolerant once established. You can't just spread seeds, though - you have to plant these little plugs 12"-18" on center. Here are two of the trays. We used three for the whole yard.

And here's the yard all planted! It was a pain, but we were once again glad that the space isn't that big. I got a horrible lower-back sunburn from leaning over for hours. You just don't think to put sunscreen there...

We also planted our lemon tree, which has lived in a big pot for a couple of years now.

 The fruits of our labor - brand new grass being watered!

Here's the yard about one month later. The grass is growing well... just not as well as the weeds.  This is when we realized that we should have actually followed the nursery's instructions for preparing the soil.

We read about what kinds of weed-killers are safe for buffalo grass, and here's the yard as of yesterday. The dead things are weeds! So, it's not beautiful yet, but we're getting there.

And now for something prettier, here are some photos of our other flowers and plants.