When we first bought our house, I wrote a column about tackling yard work on one of the hottest days of the year. I was an impetuous young man who wanted to make my home and its landscape a paradise. Unfortunately, at that time, we had one push mower to handle well over an acre of land. That parcel isn’t flat either. There is a steep slope that leads down to the neighbor’s yard and driveway and a gradual decline that leads towards the wooded area in the back. One circuit up and down was enough to put a burn in my legs and lungs.

So, we got a riding lawnmower and things were better, for a little while at least. Mowing the lawn became easier, but there was still raking to deal with and raking up the slope back towards my house is nothing short of torturous. Also, while the lawn will look well-manicured after driving over it, we have to contend with another problem, multiple varieties of grasses and weeds. I think we had a lawn and landscape company come out last year and take a look at it and they said that we had something like 18 different kinds of grass in our yard. That’s like the Galapagos Islands of grass in my backyard. When (not if) we let it go, our yard resembles a meadow. Sure, there are times when we look out on parts of yard and see an abundance of tiny purple flowers clustered together, but we shouldn’t have those in our yard and it is a little embarrassing.

Ultimately, that is one of the greatest motivations for this project that I will undertake for the next seven months. I do not want my yard to be one of the worst in the neighborhood any longer. It is one of the larger yards in the subdivision, but I will no longer use that as an excuse. Each month is this very section, I will write about one issue with my yard, talk to experts in the fields of landscaping, lawn care or gardening, create a workable plan, take before and after pictures and write about my experiences and how I fixed my yard, without the help of some magical crew from a television show (mostly because you have to pay them).

The first thing that I need to do is a basic clean-up. I will need to do the first mowing of the year, blow and possibly burn all the leaves that have fallen into the yard, create a plan for what I would like to do over the next seven months in my yard and what I can feasibly accomplish and make a list of things that I must tackle if I am ever going to fix my yard.
Among the issues I know I will have to tackle this year are:

• Trying to get one type of grass to be the uniform grass on my lawn.

• Filling in large holes towards the very back of my backyard - think potholes made of dirt.

• Find a way to eliminate or lessen the drama of the slope between my yard and the neighbors.

• Take down the nasty looking barbed wire on rotted wood fence that lies between my house and the house that was just built next door and install a better-looking border.

• Successfully plant flowers in several sections of the yard, especially in the area by our front window.

• Do something attractive with the entrance to the wooded area and creek in the very back of my back yard.

This won’t be easy and honestly, I’ll be pleased if I accomplish half of these things. If you or anyone you know might have some ideas on how to help me tackle this monstrous project, e-mail me at mboylan@thecitizen.com. I will most likely blog on our web site, www.thecitizen.com, as I go along and I will print monthly updates in this section of the paper.

login to post comments