My Tiny Money Draining Yard

The final pics of the yard with my patio set. Kennedy has pulled up a bunch of the moss (it's so tempting!), but it's trying to grow.

This is the yard that has been my weekend project for the past 6 months. Not much, but I need some props for all the stuff I learned. Tim really did help at times, but only when bribed. He did most of the underground work. It goes something like this,"Red heads don't like the sun and their freckles melt off when they sweat."

The patio was a fun pastime. Leveling dirt is just not my favorite thing to do. But now the girls can walk outside without jaunting in the mud pit. I laid the stones, Tim put in a lattice between the back fence (I hate lattice, but it was the cheapest...) and have planted some moss around the stones with soaker hoses . It's been so nice to go in my backyard and pick tiny weeds, smell my flowers and enjoy the shade while I eat my cereal ( I get this from my Dad). All this for a yard that is 10 feet by 30 feet wide. Man, that's a lot of work.

The best part was finding plants. I love to plant flowers and I finally have dirt in the ground to use. 7 years of pots on decks and patios is enough! Gardenias, Camilla, Fuschia, Hydrangea, Impatients, Honeysuckle vines and lots of ground cover--all shady. The best part is I don't have to water it. Tim is now a pro at drip lines and soaker hoses.
Thanks Dad for supplying all the dirt and rock :) It's so nice to have connections.

Tim and I put in a French drain under the retaining wall (lots of flooding problems in Roseville!). We found the retaining wall blocks on Craigslist for half as much as the store price. Love CL. Side note: each block weighs about 50 lbs. (if you're wondering how my arms got so chiseled this summer! And yes...I moved most of them myself!)

I wish I had a picture of what the backyard looked like when we moved in! I only took video of it....but it was nasty. Imagine a falling apart fence under a jungle mass of blackberry bushes. We thought our yard was only 5 feet wide until we killed all the blackberry bushes and their friends. They are so SO hard to get rid of. So this is the yard after we had worked for days clearing bushes, trash, the old fence, rotten planters and quite a few beer cans. Nice. Oh, and we excavated yards and yards of hard clay dirt that smelled like wet dog.