I love pretty yards and gardens......and I hate doing the work to get them there.

I&#39;d love to see pictures, maybe they&#39;ll inspire me.  I just inherited a lovely garden and I&#39;m afraid it&#39;ll go to rack and ruin under my lazy stewardship.  [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif[/img]

What&#39;s a Venca?  I&#39;m thinking a little purple flower?  Yes?  No?

I love being outside thie time of year. We&#39;ve got fresh veggies in the garden and it&#39;s not so hot that all the flowers are wilting.

Here&#39;s our vegetable patch- my husband&#39;s pride & joy:


Our front steps. The little pots of red geraniums are something my grandmother always did.


This is the porch of our barn/shed. The picture is a little shady, but just about everything on it is a "found" object- something I trashpicked & repurposed. I love planting in old galvanized buckets, watering cans, etc.:

I&#39;m one of those people who loves yard work.  Nothing works out agression like taking a pickaxe to a hard stretch of dirt for ten minutes.  Unfortunately my yard still looks like hell.  It&#39;s not the weeds, exactly...someone in the home&#39;s past planted a most devilish form of Kikuyu grass, which sounds like a dream:  You never have to  water or fertilize it, it never goes dormant, it&#39;s always green, and it drowns out weeds with alarming ruthlessness.  Unfortunately it also invades, overruns and destroys anything else you have planted.  I have strands of it growing up between the floorboards in the rooms of my house.  MY HOUSE&#33;  Not a little crack by the door, mind you, but in the washroom, in the baby&#39;s room, places five or ten feet from the nearest source of sunlight.  I planted raised beds and cleared out the dirt to get away from it, and now my beds all have that damned grass.

I&#39;m going to have to yank up a good patch of the yard and start over.  It&#39;s a bummer because my bulbs from last year are just starting to come up again and I hate to disturb them.  It means no flowers in the springtime&#33;


Boo hoo hoo&#33;

Awww, that&#39;s sweet, thanks&#33;

Luckily I&#39;m nowhere near the danger area, so I won&#39;t be evacuated.  Nevertheless, the sun glows bright, phosphorescent red, the moon is rusty orange, and the sky has taken on a most unappealing greige color right down to the street.  My car has dandruff all over it no matter where I park, and the dappled sunlight in my yard looks like someone sprinkled bright orange powder here and there.  It can&#39;t be healthy to breathe, but so far I&#39;m not dead or homeless so I&#39;m better off than some.

Well I pickaxed up another chunk of yard today.  I&#39;m going to try a berm on one side of the house to keep the water where I want it and not let it run out all over the yard.  The berm runs along my fence in a wedge shape and I&#39;ve planted some great heirloom sweet pea seeds.  I didn&#39;t have the heart to yank out the ruby red ivy geraniums that ware there right now so I hope they&#39;ll be agreeable to each other.  It would really be nice to have a wall of pink and blue sweet peas with ruby "slippers".

I also lost my mind at a local nursery.  They had a 50% off sale recently and I went mad.  I planted one gardenia against the garage, there are two more waiting to be planted on either side, and I have two Sweet Box  shrubs that have to go somewhere soon.  No one&#39;s ever heard of sweet box but they&#39;re like stealth fragrance bushes.  They&#39;re always green and glossy and the tiny white flowers hide under the leaves, but it smells like heaven in the spring, and no one knows where the perfume is coming from.

I have dozens of bulbs waiting for me in the fridge and I&#39;m running out of room for them.  I&#39;m afraid I&#39;ll have to spend some of my Christmas gift money on myself for some new pots, but I love the idea of pink and white tulips growing out of a small, drippy sea of rose-pink pansies.


The only nightmare waiting for me in the yard right now is fall.  I rake up leaves and throw them out, but the next morning they&#39;re there again, blanketing my yard.  Last year I just left them there and they did all right for a while, even helped protect my lawn and plants from a surprise frost.  It wasn&#39;t the most attractive look, though, and when I finally raked them all up I discovered that the neighborhood cats had all used the lovely "litterbox" I&#39;d so thoughtfully left out for them.  My yard stank for weeks.