Nature rampant...

I love nature (most of it, most of the time). I love gardening (again, most of the time). I have several garden beds around my house and I usually getting out in them to clean them and plant new things and watch them grow. However, as the years have gone by I have gotten less and less time to work on gardening, and as a result, my gardens have gotten a bit...untidy. They are too much for me. I have too many garden beds, too many flowers, etc. I really should only have one garden bed at this point, but most of them were already part of the house when we moved in. We added one in the back corner of the backyard because it really needed something back there. But there were also four other garden beds already...well, five if you count the hosta border around the pool deck. So that's six total, which is a lot.
Which is why I was happy when one of them (on the side of the house) was cleared out of the huge arborvitae that had taken over and was just a bare patch ready for anything I wanted to put that might be easy to maintain. I foolishly attempted blueberries and raspberries, since I love eating those, but they didn't last very long (barely had leaves on them). That bed pretty much was bare by the end of the summer. On the other side of the house was also cleared out when the foundation on that side had to be repaired. I had intended to put the stacked stone border back and lay down mulch, but never got around to it on account of becoming pregnant and also dealing with indoor house renovations (computer room and family room).

Well, Spring rolled around...and being very pregnant, I just could NOT get out there to take care of the garden beds as much as I wanted. I managed to get to the other four and remove the dead stuff and straighten up, but that was it. But I figured it wasn't a big deal, because the side beds were just empty and bare and...well...one of them wasn't even a garden bed. I could figure out plants at some other point.

Except...well...I forgot about weeds. Yeah, um...if you leave bare earth/mulch on it's own and don't have any plants there to compete with...well...

I give you side garden number one...the shady side of the house:



Not TOO horrible, nice and green, but still not what I would want there. (This is the side where the foundation work was done, so it's just bare earth, no mulch or anything).

Then I give you side garden number two...the sunny side of the house:



Holy growing weeds, batman!
This is AFTER my husband sprayed it with Round-Up and it died. Before this it was almost two foot tall in spots and looked like an small abandoned field. Thistle and hairy watercress and such abounded.

As the weeks rolled by and I couldn't find time to get out there to address it in any way, aside from having my husband spray the crap out of it (newborns don't really like you abandoning them in favor of weeding)...I got panicky. I didn't want to do much to it, just get rid of the nasty weeks and make it look a little nicer and prevent any further weed growth. But I knew I wasn't going to have time for that. Having built up the sunny side garden last year after the trees were cut down the previous autumn, I knew how much work it would be to remove the weeds and mulch, lay down weed barrier fabric, and then a layer of stone/gravel that would make it harder for weeds to grow. And then do the same thing on the other side.

So...we are hiring a landscaper to do this for us, and he is even putting in some nice snazzy perennial plants that are low/easy maintenance. And for just a tad more, as a complimentary service, he is even going to weed and trim the big front garden, which I haven't been able to touch in almost two months now and is starting to look frazzled.

Pictures over the weekend/early next week when it's completed (he is planning to do the work on Friday or Saturday).