Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Today was the day to get outdoors and clean up our garden. Now, I’ve said before that I am not a gardener and by that I mean, nothing…nada…

I love and appreciate gardens and I also love and appreciate those who take care of them. I’m one of those people who would love to have a yard and garden, but then pay for someone to come over and take care of it. I’m not ashamed to say it either!

Now that I have a little French garden I’ve got to figure out how to take care of it. Luckily it already has full grown trees and bamboo. There’s plenty of water here so if that’s all they need then I should be good to go. The original owners had the insightfulness to put gravel everywhere so we don’t need to worry about grass.

When we first visited the house, the garden was the first thing we saw when we walked into the gate. I was in love. At that time, spring was in full swing and the trees were all covered in leaves, but the garden had not been taken care of in so long that the ground was covered by the fallen leaves and debris of all the past autumns. Still, you could tell that it would be a wonderful garden with some love and care (that I didn’t know how to give).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, now it was time to learn. Like I said just trees so it shouldn’t be too big of a deal. Besides, today was only clean-up day.

Dude and I started with the weed pulling and picking up all the debris and fallen leaves in the yard. Then while I continued on with that, Dude decided that our four fir trees (I think that’s what they are) needed a haircut. I think he went a little crazy cuz now they’re naked with little fros. Oh well, maybe they’ll sprout limbs again in the spring. I hope so!

We also had this really ugly fountain by the front door of the apartment that was made out of rock and cement. This thing was awful and we couldn’t even figure it out. I told Dude that we needed to get rid of it since I was going to put a real fountain in the garden next spring. So he took a mallet to it and boy was that an afternoon’s worth of work for him. Now what we had was a giant hole in the ground. So we ran over to Point P to get some bags of sand to fill it up! Then we used some dirt from the yard to cover and compact the sand and put some gravel over it. Voila, gone. Now it looks like nothing was ever there.

I tell you, Dude really knows what he’s doing sometimes.

With all the trimming, pulling weeds, picking up debris and knocking down stupid fountains we sure had a ton of stuff for the trash man. We actually had to sneak some of the bags over to our neighbor’s houses cuz if we piled all of it up at ours that would have been embarrassing.

We even had a few visitors that afternoon.

Now we have a nice trimmed garden and we even found something to do with this really strange cement thing we have in our yard. Dude said it might have been a dog house or a table of some sort, but now it’s missing its top.

I guess in the future, if we ever got a dog that would be a good place for it. A nice stone, garden table would be great, too. I think, however, it would make a great fire pit. So guess what? That is exactly what we used it for that night! We took some of the wood that we had left over from some of our demolition and we made a bonfire. It was awesome. I am not sure that this is legal to do, but it was fun. We were only missing the marsh mellows.

Well, I’ll make sure we have some of those for the next time cuz we still got some wood left over 🙂

By the way, the little, yellow visitor that came to see us~if anyone knows what he/she is, please let me know. It was so cute and wobbly when it walked, but Dude and I just couldn’t figure out what he was!

If you want to see more photos of my garden they appear on Flickr. To get there just click on the “More Photos” option under Photos on Flickr.