The Yard

It's such a relief to finally get to post about the yard. It's taken a lot of our time & energy and I'm still crossing my fingers that everything will grow!  Here's a few pictures from along the way.  These first few pictures came from mid-June when we found baby birds in our vent from the laundry room. We heard them before we saw them because they were always chirping.  Cameron had to get up on a ladder and pull them out before we put up some wood slats to make sure no other birds make their home in our house.







This is how our yard looked with all the weeds and all the rocks. We had to kill all the weeds with Round-up and rake all the rocks into lines and then shovel them into a wheelbarrow and take them out of the yard.


You can see the lines and piles of rocks here. My Mom & Dad were great to come and help us over Memorial Day with these rocks.


This is the yard all cleared and ready for some good rich topsoil!


All of the rocks in the fire pit came from our yard, most of them we hand-picked.


Our first pile of dirt, approximately 3 tons. When the semi dropped off the dirt he got stuck on a little pile of gravel and our neighbor had to help to pull him out using a little old truck. It was funny to watch :)


On Saturday, June 19th we had someone come help us spread the first pile. Here's what we got spread the first night. Mostly along the back fence.


Showing some progress as the week continued.


We also had to take care of all the red ants in our yard, they seemed to be everywhere. This is just one of their hills.


On June 26th we rented a Bobcat and Cameron spread the second pile of dirt we had received earlier in the week.  That day was also fun because I was moving a portion of fence that we had taken apart to get the Bobcat in and I stepped on a nail. To make a short story shorter I am now up to date on my tetanus shots and am doing fine. By the end of the day I was back out in the yard spreading dirt with a rake.


Here's the work we got done at the end the day.


And to show my hard work I had Cameron take a picture of my sweaty hat. It's exhausting work and I have calluses and a few blisters to prove it.


This is what the competed yard looks like. We put some rocks around the trees so the grass won't be right up next to them and the trees won't have to compete to grow.  You can see little footprints and shadows in this picture and when they came to spray the hydro seed on Wednesday they said that would hinder the growth because some spots would get missed due to the ridges and shadows so we had to rake over the yard one more time to smooth everything out. 



They came back Thursday and Ta-Da! We now have the hydro seed and are on our way to grass.



It's such a funny color



Here's what it looks like today, on the 4th of July, after being diligently watered the last few days. It should take 3-4 weeks to be ready to mow!



5 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh my that baby bird is sooooo cute! And awesome job with the yard, it looks like you have lots of property!

Anonymous said...

yeah! It will be gorgeous

Steph said...

HOLY COW that's a lot of work! I'm impressed!

Anonymous said...

That is a lot of work! That will be fantastic when it is all done and you have this huge yard to play in!!

Anonymous said...

Wow! Your back yard is HUGE!!! So fun!