YARD

Every time I think about our yard from when we purchased the house, a song plays in my head. How does it go....."In the jungle, the mighty jungle..." You could not go out without bug spray. Because of the trees, ferns and overgrown bushes we had sporadic nests of carpenter ants, moss on the roof, squirrels in the attic, and very acidic top soil. Best thing to do is just start all over.

BEFORE



Total of 11- 60-70 foot pine trees and several other lilacs, and arborvitae. All overgrown, never trimmed. The stone area on the right picture was a flower garden. I would say 50% weed, 50% flowers. By mid-summer the weeds would be 4 feet tall. I had no patience for cleaning it up. When the weeds take over we would just mow the whole thing down.

Side porch showing the abundance of pine needles. The right picture is our neighbor side of the house. We have a labrador that needed an area to call his own and this was the perfect spot to fence in.

Is there a house in here for sale?





Here is the dog area. Before we moved in, this area had to be done. I did not want him in the front yard with all the traffic. After evicting all the overgrown weeds and uncovering all the garbage that was buried under the jungle, we filled and leveled the area and planted grass. It is a very small area for him and if you own a dog you would understand why we cant get the grass to grow. But rather here than our front yard. Of course this was before we had children and the dog was all we had to take care of.

Almost done with the trees on the left. On the right there is this stump that will come to haunt me later when I run electrical underground to the water fountain.

The only tree we saved was this mountain ash. We loved it. The next year a windstorm snapped off the top and it also had to come down. If anything else could go wrong, three of these arborvitae's did not make it either. For the main yard we had a landscaper scrape off the top 3 inches of soil and replace with new black soil and lawn seed. We finally roto-tilled in the flower garden after salvaging everything we could and seeded that to match.

Finished landscaping in the front and by the neighbor's side.

The spiral trees were nice while they were alive. As it turns out, the flat roof drains in all the inside corners and in winter the ice is too much for the trees to bare.

Recent updates include red granite rock, enlarged flower beds and fence.