The Backyard Blues

(Hi! This was supposed to have posted on Friday, or was it Thursday? Anyhoo, I'm posting it now, better late than never!)

I am so not in love with my tiny patch of yard dirt behind my house! Lucas and I spent some of the afternoon out there on Sunday, playing pirate vs. tiger and with all the wind the dirt just blows around and it is not a fun place to be.

I have some hard work ahead of me to get it into shape, but I thought I would start by making it at least nice-looking-enough to want to go out there and get to work. Make sense? Clear as mud? Good.

Here's a before shot, or two, so you can see what I'm dealing with (not that the after is much better, but it's an improvement at least!).

And here's the after:

I made a bunting/flag/pennant/banner-thing to give the fence a little colour before the plants come in/before I buy some plants. I actually bought some plants already, at Salisbury, and got them in before it rained on Wednesday. I bought some lamium, a beautiful Jacob's Ladder, and some kind of yellow and red-leafed thing with an "H" name. They are all shade plants, and Mom says that lamium spreads so I'm hoping that they do well back here in the shady glen!

Dad is going to came over yesterday to help me fix my compost so the roots from the tree don't invade it as desperately as they are right now. We're putting a large board down under the bin...I'll let you know how that works. This means I have to empty my compost bin, move it, then reassemble it! Eek! That's probably going to be a whole day's/weekend's work, so I'm leaving that until the weekend. (It only took us a couple of hours of really hard work, but Dad does the work of about two or three of me, so it went much quicker than I anticipated!)

Other plans include putting in a new flower bed along the fence, attaching some planters to the fence, and getting some new furniture. The stuff that is back there now was a wedding gift from my dear friend Sarah. I got married 8 years ago, so I think it's time to upgrade. Besides, this stuff is starting to turn to powder, which means every time I sit on it, I get up to a white back and bottom. That's a good thing to tackle today...on this lazy Sunday! HA! Simone and I were joking about long weekends the other day, and how the only thing they're really good for is working outside...why relax that extra day when you need to get your garden in!?!

Check back here tomorrow for a cute and crazy birthday present for a little sweetheart, and on Tuesday for a shop update! What the!?

Note: Some of you may be wondering what kind of a game "pirate vs. tiger" is. Some of you may not, but I'm recording this for posterity people! Backstory...I downloaded Plants vs. Zombies for the iPad the other day and we have been playing it more-or-less non stop since then. Lucas is slightly obsessed, and even when we're not playing it on the iPad he's pretending to be a plant or a zombie and trying to get me to play along as well. So I finally told him that I was not going to play along with this one, and wanted to see if he could come up with another game (he told me he didn't want to because he wasn't obssessed enough with anything else...yay I taught him a new word!?). So we invented "pirate vs. tiger", which is essentially me playing either the pirate or the tiger (we have to take turns y'know), singing a funny song (because all my games have improvised songs in them) and Lucas chases me and we giggle. Good Times, like Super Good Times!

Note: Some of you may be wondering what one of my funny songs sounds like. I'm thinking that I might do a vlog about that one day. Oh my...what have I got myself into!!??