The Back Yard

A few days ago I shared pictures of the front yard. Today I wanted to show the back yard, which is very much a work in progress. I have several projects going right now. I'm weeding around the maple trees and edging so it will look neater and also to make it easier for my son to mow around. I would eventually like to have trees, shrubs, and perennials around the perimeter of the yard like my neighbor behind me does.

Last week I had a neighbor child ride his bicycle through my backyard flowerbed, the children and teens always use my yard as the path to the playground. On Friday, two older teens rode their bikes through my front yard, it is so frustrating. Every year about this time we start thinking about moving. I like children, but to me this is just rude. My yard is private property, I don't want to be mean, but I just don't like the constant traffic through my yard. Not only that, but people actually bring their dogs to the playground and allow them to roam unleashed into my yard to use the bathroom. Anyway, enough griping about that.

Here is my new swing. I love to sit out here in the mornings and have my coffee.

This project has been much larger than I had originally planned. I already had a flower bed in the front and back yards and I wanted to connect them both to the new bed on the side of the house. The old bed went behind the birch tree and I thought it would look better to extend it further and go in front of the tree. I have had to remove the grass and redo the existing blocks. As I weed and pull the grass from the maple trees, I'm saving the dirt and putting it in this bed on top of newspaper. I've also bought some bags of soil, manure and peat to put in the new area. It's been too dry to plant anything new, so I may wait until fall to fill in the space. This new bed was started last October, so far everything is doing well.

This bed, along the side of the yard, was also started last fall and is not yet completed. The aborvitae that we planted this spring is doing well. My grasses are not doing as well as I'd hoped, in fact they have been a disappointment. This is the bed the little boy rode his bicycle through. Obviously I need to plant a little more to fill in the gaps. I don't have any flowers here just hosta, lambs ear, lily-turf, grasses and the trees. I need to add some perennials. When I divide my daisies I'll put them in this bed. I also want neater edging around this bed, I tend to do that by hand rather than with a shovel, so that will take a while.


Here is another shot of the project. You can see a little better in this picture where I extended the bed. I still have a small section of grass to remove. If we were getting some rain I'd be really eager to finish this and get new things planted, but I really don't want to have more to pamper and water right now. I do hope we soon get rain.