Yard work

When I look at my yard I quickly become frightened and overwhelmed at how much there is to do. I love our house, and want the rest of our quarter acre lot to look as nice as it does. The problem is that we have a lumpy quarter acre of gravel interspersed with pine trees and knarly stumps and evil roots poking out of crumbling 5 foot high dirt banks. It would be a relatively simple matter to get it looking adequate anyway, but we don’t want adequate. We have ideas, and dreams, and have watched way too much City Gardener, and looked at way too many Sunset magazines with neat landscaping pictures, and now we know exactly what we want and don’t want to settle for less. Which is fine, and the end result will be amazing and make our house feel more like home and add to the value of our investment blah blah blah, but man… when i start to think about how much money and work it will take I get rather grouchy and want to go back into denial.

I know (but have trouble “living” it) that we have to take it one step at a time - first get the yard flattened out, then get topsoil brought it and smoothed out, then plant grass, do a front walk (we used plywood this winter. caution - slippery when icy), put in flower beds, retaining walls, raised garden beds, plant said flower and garden, put in a patio, build a wood shed and …. that’s all I can think of right now. Oh yeah, and replace those last couple of fence sections that are still wire with wood panels. Oh, and build the wood panels too.

Eek.

Time to go read in the papasan chair. Check out Mike’s recent post to see our newly refurbished Zen Den. Whenever I get stressed I just need to look at that.