Author: Bo

So we’re still working in the yard… we’re replacing all the bark in the flower beds with rock and here’s what we’ve done so far…. It is actually full of rocks but they’re a bit wet because I watered them to get the weed killer to soak in.

This is the back border along the fence in the back yard. We’re going to grass between the rocks and the patio that you can’t see here.

Almost the entire back yard.

We got this flower bed started and finished today. I dug out one of the plants and gave it to the neighbor who traded me 2 small trees to plant in the back yard in our corners to try to clean it up a little in this flower bed in front. It took an act of God to stop us from working in the yard but we dumped the last load of rock in the flower bed and within a minute it was pouring down rain. Guess we’re done for the day… Next we get to plant the 2 small trees/shrubs in back then spread all this dirt below to seed and grow grass. Hopefully we can get it spread, rolled, seeded, fertilized and watered this week!

Bo and I specifically chose the smallest lot to put our house on for a reason, we both hate yard work and don’t want to have to do a lot to maintain a decent yard. The front yard was installed when they built the house but we didn’t want to spend the money to get a back yard at the time. We’ve since received a notice that we need to install the yard since the rules say you have 6 months to do it from moving in and we’ve been here 9 months now. So this is what we started with. Extremely rocky hard dirt with about 2′ tall weeds. Ugh. This was Thursday afternoon…

Thursday afternoon…

We borrowed a weed whacker from a friend and Bo whacked the weeds and I followed him with a rake cleaning up the mess. We were out until 10pm Thursday night weed whacking and raking until it was too dark to see and we got eaten alive by the mosquitos. We got more than 1/2 of the yard done though which felt good! The we had a friend (thanks Jer!) with a weed whacker come over and help us finish up Friday morning and in about 1-2 hours we had it finished and ready for the rock rake.

This is the back yard after weed whacking & raking. We have an empty lot next to us that hasn’t sold yet so we were able to rake the piles into the empty lot next door into their 2 foot tall weeds.

Dad arrived Saturday morning (thanks dad!!) with the John Deere & rock rake and gave Bo the low down on how he works… He told him that the rules are that he (dad) watches ONLY the house when he is driving the machine and if Bo gets run over it was his own fault cuz Bo needed to keep himself out of the way of the machine.
We spent about 3 hours rock raking and raking by hand to get the yard ready for topsoil next week.

Dad was on the tractor, Bo was using the only rake we own….
And I just took pictures of myself so I could be included too! Ha.
Dad let Bo on the tractor, Bo explained it to me this way: “He told me ‘here’s how you go forward, here’s how you go backward, now get off.'” Hahahaha.
Apparently dad give me a bit more of an in depth lesson on how to run it because I got to drive it around dumping stuff.

I told dad I want to buy pea gravel instead of bark for a border along the fence. I don’t like bark and I don’t want to use it, I would rather have rock. He told me I was crazy, that we have hundreds of dollars worth of rocks right here that we were taking out of the yard so we decided to use these ones for free! BUT, we hand picked almost every single rock which has taken a LOOOOONG time and a lot of effort. Jerry came back over with his truck today and helped us pick rocks and use his truck to transport them. We drove around the neighborhood stealing rocks from neighbors yards who didn’t want them. We’re not done yet but we made a ton of progress this weekend, we’ve got most of the rocks, the ground is ready for topsoil and we bought the seed and fertilizer to plant grass. More work next weekend! This is how it looked this afternoon when we finished up. We just need to hand pick a few more truckloads of rocks.

We had such a blast, we were tired and sore and dirty and loved every minute of it and can’t wait to go again!