One of my long term goals is to re-line the old garden beds, edge out some new ones for wildlife sanctuary purposes, and to put in several stone pathways as part of the “get rid of this damned lawn and turn it into something nicer and not a drain on natural resources. Also, I hate mowing, and the less grass there is, the less I have to mow. My dislike of “lawn culture” is pretty epic. Of course, all of this requires a vast quantity of suitable rocks and pavers, and I have an aversion to paying for rocks.

My plan is to avoid having to pay for as many of them as I can get away with. Part of that plan involves teaming up with other friends and relatives who have the opposite problem: a pile of rocks in their yards that they don’t want, but don’t want to pay someone to take away, because paying for ROCKS is ridiculous.

I mentioned this plan on FB, figuring I’d get a couple buckets of rocks, and maybe a slate or two, and OMG, ONE OF MY FRIENDS AND HIS WIFE HAVE A CRAPLOAD OF PAVERS SLATE AND GRANITE PAVERS. Like, this is going to take several trips to get. I hit the motherfucking JACKPOT, and I am SO EXCITED I can’t even. In one shot, I’m going to have enough pavers to either completely do one of the walkways or line out the complete pathways for the eventual potager garden that I’m planning to build in the side yard. The photo is only the first trip that we made this afternoon, and there’s probably going to be two or three more trips to get all of them. (My truck isn’t a heavy duty vehicle, sadly, or I’d be able to do it in fewer trips.)

I also recently registered the property as part of the NWF’s wildlife habitat network, mostly to get the sign to put up to let people know that yes, the weeds, high grass, and unraked leaves are deliberate, and not that I’m letting the place go to hell. One of the reasons that I want rocks is I’m going to use them to designate sections of the yard where grasses, flowering “weeds”, and other food/shelter plants will be planted and allowed to do their thing in a controlled manner so that it looks neater, while creating a micro-system where native flora and fauna can thrive. Over time, I plan to have the beds be made up of exclusively native plants. I have no intention of ceding the property to the wildlife, but I do intend to make it so that we can all cohabitate on the land in a more equitable manner for everyone who lives here, not just the humans. Plus, every house that makes provisions for the local flora and fauna helps combat habitat loss and improves the overall environment. If the neighbors complain about the spikes of evening primrose and clusters of joe-pye-weed, well, I’m siding with the butterflies and the families of wrens and cardinals that also live here.

That was a far longer hiatus than I’d planned when I originally started writing this. A LOT has happened in the meantime. Like, good gods.

Just weeks after my last post, the job I was working at reached critical mass on toxic bullshit, and we parted ways. Becoming unemployed immediately after buying a house is, um, exciting. Thankfully we had the money set aside and allocated for the immediate repairs we’d had to do, but still, yikes.

(I’m now a somewhat self-employed blogger and artist, but not yet making enough to contribute much, which is frustrating. Still working on building that up.)

My step-mom passed away two years ago this past February. She never did get to see the house. We had Dad over for dinner a couple of times, but then Covid-19 hit and we haven’t been able to see each other since. With vaccines finally getting rolled out that will hopefully change soon.

Last fall we did a major exterior renovation, and the house now has entirely new siding and a brand new roof. Got that done, just in time, too, as the roof started leaking literally three days before the roofers were scheduled to show up. Gods, that was a project and a half. It was supposed to take no more than 9 days, and ended up taking a month and some change before they finally finished everything and got the damned debris cleaned up. So glad I will most likely never have to deal with that mess again.

Sadly, the next-door neighbor, Dan, who was really sweet and had grown up in his house passed away this past winter, just after Christmas. Not sure what his kids plan on doing with the house, but I wish they’d hurry up. Houses don’t do well being empty, and Dan loved that house too much for it to fall apart.

Most of the plans I’d originally had for our yard had to be put on hold for a year or two, because holy gods, it was in worse shape than I’d realized.

The soil turned out to be so amazingly stripped of anything beneficial, that mowing was all but impossible in sections. There was so little root system that the mower would literally push the grass layer off in strips because they only went down maybe half an inch and the sod had no structural integrity at all. There were sections of bare hardpack in the back yard, and ffs, there’s still a layer of sand-and-weed covered LANDSCAPING PAPER in the side yard.

We lost control of the side yard by the stream almost immediately, because when the replacement oil tank was brought in, it had been raining for several days and the mud was so bad that the ground got mangled badly enough that I wasn’t able to get the mower through it and the jewelweed and other plant life took over.

I basically gave up mowing most of the yard for two summers. No raking was done. The yard desperately needed time to just sit and compost and grow roots. There’ll be time enough to deal with the wreckage.

That time is this year. We got the worst of the hedges trimmed back to reasonable heights last fall so that the construction crews could actually get through them. I’m probably going to cut them back even more this year, and remove a couple of things. I also want to at least get an estimate on poison ivy removal, because there are several aggressive stands that are beyond anything my allergic ass wants to tangle with, that are preventing me from dealing with some of the invasives that are eating half the property line.

I’m in the process of collecting rocks to edge the garden beds with and to start working on lining out sections that will be left alone as wildlife habitat. There’s a decent amount of native plants that I want to encourage to grow, but I also don’t want to live in a feral mess, either. I figure that I’ll let the really steep hill section do it’s thing, until we can hopefully get it graded properly, and that way the wildlife gets food and shelter, and I don’t have to drag the lawnmower on a 45 degree incline.

The front yard will be having an unmown swath up by the road, which will eventually be planted with native grasses and wildflowers to deal with road runoff. It’s already a partial rain-garden, I’m just going to encourage it in that endeavor. The flat, wide side yard will be getting the landscaping paper ripped out and several raised beds for food gardening will be put in. I’ve been working on designing the layout based on medieval gardens. Eventually I would like to put in a fence around the front and side, to both delineate between our yard and the neighbors’, but also to train climbing flowers and/or bramble fruits to run along.

I’m working on what to do with the front bed where the roses are, since the roses are doing Very Badly, and I’m not sure I’m up to the task of saving them. We’ll see. I’m trying to find my gauntlets so I can work on getting them pruned and the other plants that are trying to eat them cleared up. The last people put several inches of MULCH right up around their canes and then failed to remove things like trees that took root, so each bush is going to take a lot of up-close work to free up, and then I’ve still got to deal with the overabundance of old mulch before I can even figure out what’s next.

So many plans. So much work to do, but eventually this place is going to be transformed into a little witchy heaven, full of native flora and fauna, and a gorgeous garden. It’s just going to take time and work.