Pet Rocks

The weird bit of dirt to the left of the driveway has been neglected even longer than the rest of the front yard.

It looked like this when we moved in:

Then it pretty much looked like that for two years, give or take some black plastic that never did kill the weeds like the internet promised. We've had a long standing plan to fill the area with some nice looking rocks, build a wood walkway to extend the driveway surface, and maybe plant some fountain grass.

We were renting a truck to take window waste to the dump, so we took the opportunity to get the rocks. We discovered that landscape rocks can be crazy expensive. We found some we liked then realized that they're $620 a ton. And we needed at least 1.5 tons. Uh, what?

So we decided to learn to like the MUCH cheaper ones.

Getting a lot of rocks into a truck at a landscape place is a piece of cake. You park on the scales and they dump the rocks in the truck. Getting them out is harder, to put it mildly.

Here's the truck with about a half ton of rocks, so 1/3 of the total. We removed them from the truck a shovel full at a time. It didn't take as long as I feared, but it did hurt for several days following.

But, bright side! We now have lovely and intentional looking rocks instead of dirt and weeds.

The wood walkway and potential plants will just have to wait, along with every other project!

Greener pastures

Oh hey there, first post of 2014! We've been a little discouraged by our slow progress on many projects. We still ponder and plan about house projects constantly, but it's been hard to actually finish any of our schemes. We have accomplished a few things, though, so I'll attempt a series of catch-up posts.

First of all, I was looking through the last couple of old posts and realized that when we left off, the front yard looked like this:

It looks significantly better now!

Right now it's unmown. It looks kind of nice and meadowy like that, but it tends to try to escape, so we do have to mow it every now and then.

We did one little project that you currently can't see because the grass is so tall and has grown so aggressively.

We wanted a border between the yard and the flower bed areas, but we don't really like most of the Home Depot-available landscape borders. We went to our awesome local landscape supply yard and scored some authentic San Francisco cobbles. Well... it says they're San Francisco cobbles, but perhaps they were hoping for gullible buyers just like us. In any case, they're nice looking squarish stones, so we threw a bunch into our long suffering car.

Here they are in place. The grass wasn't as aggressive at that point, so they looked pretty nice.

Here's a similar view today. That ridge in the grass is the spot where it's overtaking the stone border. I'm planning to learn to use the weed eater so I can cut the grass back from the border and back off of the sidewalk. But really, in what universe is learning to weed eat a particularly high priority?

The rosemary and lavender are going crazy, and the canna lilies are the tallest we've seen. Apparently they thrive on a diet of crappy soil and mild neglect.

Our succulent project is coming along well, too. Every now and then we divide the plants that are doing really well and replace ones that have died. For the most part, they seem very happy. We had lots of cool flowers this year, though I didn't manage to get photos of any.