landscaping

Sorry, I’m tired and that’s the best I could come up with! And technically, it was only one mommy.

This is a long overdue picture that shows all the plants that Stephanie got into the yard. It looks SO much better than before. Now that we have no more grass, all the sprinklers were disconnected, and we are 100% on drip irrigation. It’s a bit of a pain to set up, but it’s so nice to be able to target the water exactly where it’s needed. Oh, and the fact that we don’t have to nurture the gazillion new plants with manual watering is pretty great, too.

Why is there a picture of Butchart Gardens on our blog?

Technically, this should be called part 29, because it feels like we’ve been here before

Yesterday was our annual we’d-better-get-out-and-cut-down-the-3-foot-tall-weeds-before-they-swallow-children-or-pets event.  As anyone who lives in the Pacific NW knows, springtime makes everything grow like it’s in a jungle.  It makes things very pretty, except in our yard, which is about 90% weeds.

We are committed to some big changes this year, so keep checking in to see it evolve…

The weeds will take back over as soon as we go to sleep

Stephanie finished putting in many new plants, so our barren wasteland is starting to look like an oasis.  After a winter of Portland rains, this should be looking pretty lush by spring.

These pictures make the hauling up of 4 yards of compost look easy!

The planter bed, with the new crape myrtle and jasmine plants.  You can see our next door neighbor’s planter bed, too.

Our friend Scott came over with his truck and yanked the nasty junipers out of our planter bed.  Our neighbors all seemed to be really happy about this…

 Our bare patch from last summer got completely overgrown with grass and weeds.

You can see the giant apartment building behind our house.  The patio cover serves a secondary purpose of giving us privacy from the building.

The new sod definitely looks better than what we started with.  It was a full day ordeal lugging the sod up the steps and around into the sideyard, but it came out pretty good in the end.

Ready for sod!

Julio dug trenches for sprinklers by hand.  While it would have been nice to use a power trencher, our raised lot makes it very difficult to bring in anything heavy.  Often, it seems like more work to get the equipment up to our yard than it is just do do something the hard way. 

It felt ironic to us to be putting in a lawn and sprinklers, since that’s not what we’re into.  We are much bigger fans of naturescaping and putting in plants that require fewer resources.  But, since we wanted our daughter to have a place to play, we opted to put in a section of grass.  Because of Portland’s extremely dry summers, it would die without some amount of watering during the summer.  We decided to put in the sprinklers in order to be able to program for the minimal water usage possible, as opposed to our past technique of setting up a sprinkler and then forgetting that it was on.  There was one time years ago that we left one on all night!  A sprinkler system seemed like the best compromise to not use excessive water.  And, after having lived with it for a year, we can say that it really is great.  We also ran some lines for drip irrigation of some landscaping, and we highly recommend that, too.