Its March! Saturday was sunny and beautiful! I spent the day in the yard for the first time in a LONG time. It was so nice. Even doing the yucky jobs. Soren and I cleaned up poop. I drained the pool cover. And we mowed up leaves (cause it's hard to identify the poop until the leaves are gone) and used those to mulch the trees. It felt like I was vacuuming the lawn. And that was really fun to learn to do the riding mower. It makes me so happy that we invested in making everything less maintenance and that is already paying off. It was not that much work to get things looking better.
After it was done we sat around the fire and Soren invited friends over for s'mores. I love the random sunny days like this and am so excited to have more of them in the next month or so! Its nice not to have a minefield of dog poop in the yard and we can all go out and run around.
I've been working on a "base sheet" for my landscape design class of the yard. So the tricky part is we have so many existing trees and plants to plot out on those. And I have to decide what I want to change.
So there are $$ projects for "someday" like changing the decking around the pool. Should I include that on my design? Or just stick to the changes we already know we need that are easier to do. So anyway, it's been fun to take an inventory and think through what I eventually want.
The first priority is having someone come in and move the boulders that are in the beds throughout the yard. I don't like them because I want things to be symmetrical and some are in a place that doesn't work. We will use the boulders to retain the sloped area by the garage and add a parking space for the basement apartment so two cars can park on the driveway in that area.
We have some areas that need to be leveled better. And it was fun to see that we could rent the equipment to do it ourselves. Sounds kinda fun to move dirt with those bigger machines. We would like to make a little patio out of flagstone near the cutting garden and also level out the area near the fruit trees to expand the garden area and add a low tunnel in the future.
We also want to get some light poles to hang our lights around the pool in a nicer way. And also we are looking at adding more accent lighting to the outside. It would be cool to learn how to do that too! I saw the parts at the sprinkler store and that piqued my interest.
I counted up all the trees and we have over 200 trees in our yard. Most of those are aspens and gambel oak. So I don't have to draw those individually they can be clumped. Still its going to take awhile to do all of these!
Trees
Backyard
190 trees
104 gambel oaks
40 aspens
2 blue spruce
1 Norway Spruce
1 Austrian
Rainier Cherry
Nectarine
French prune
Peach
Peach
Plum ornamental
Cherry
Peach
3 crabapple
1 apple
3 espalier apple
1 apple
3 ornamental pear
2 ornamental cherry
2 Canadian chokecherry
1 maple
Japanese maple
Weeping cherry
5 aspen
Karl Fuchs cedar
8 aspens
Apricot
Asian pear
Front yard
13 trees
London plane tree
Birch
Weeping white spruce
Tricolor birch
2 ornamental pear
3 crabapple
1 autumn blaze maple
3 Austrian pine
I was excited to start this plan. I have 600 baby plants coming in April. So I kinda need a plan to incoroporate them into the beds, and also to possibly use some in rows and in the garden boxes. The main thing is getting enough water to them. Because I can move them later if I want.
I made a collage of the flowers that I've ordered and it makes me happy to look at them. A lot of them are perennial and so easy to grow. So it's nice to know I won't have to keep planting them. And I got a bunch of tubers from various sales to expand my dahlias. These are my Valentines flowers this year. I told Jared not to buy me flowers and he bought me some anyway and they are still blooming. They are lasting so long.
