Landscaping is pretty far down on the list of things I
enjoy. I don’t take pride in being self
sufficient. However being a homeowner
with a significant amount of unstructured time, I do take care of the
yard. I cut the grass in the summer
time, rake leaves in the fall and shovel snow in the winter. A couple of times a year I will trim the
bushes.
When we moved into our home, the back yard had recently been
professionally landscaped. My father in
law went one step further and planted perennials that year which have really
added great color to our back yard. Over
the past few years, the area has deteriorated and is now as much weeds as it is
beautiful splashes of color.
That brings up my landscaping project for the weekend. I headed out Sunday morning to join the masses
at Home Depot. The crowds were as
expected, but there was plenty of staff on hand and the lines were moving
pretty quickly. I was guided to the
mulch and black plastics area and was quickly overwhelmed by the selection at
my disposal. Fortunately there was
another shopper who was comfortable doling out advice. I bought 3’x50’ roll of weed block, 20 weed
block stakes, 10 cubic feet (5 bags) of large bark mulch, a pair of work gloves
and a short square point shovel. With my
wallet $80 lighter, I headed home to go to work.
Clearing the old mulch went reasonably quickly. I was also pulling a lot of weeds and at
times getting confused between weeds and foliage to be preserved. However after 90 minutes I had a trash can
plus 4 lawn bags full of weeds, mulch and other debris. Next, I started with the black plastic. By this time my daughters had taken an
interest and were holding one end of the weed block roll and handing me stakes
to hold it in place. I ended up being
about 10 feet shy of what I really needed, but it worked out OK. Next, I started application of the new
mulch. 10 cubic feet only covered about
half of the area in question so it was back to Home Depot for another 5 bags of
mulch ($20). This took care of the job
pretty well. The last item was
re-routing all of the sprinkler system lines.
This is something I should have done before putting down the mulch. As a result the lines are not hidden, but
fortunately are not that aesthetically distracting.
The whole project was 3 hours start to finish and looks
great through the first week. Hopefully
it is a job done right and not a job that I will be revisiting next year. $100 was pretty reasonable and hiring the job
out would have cost a couple hundred dollars and may not have been performed
well.
Assuming everything works out, I met get the girls a smallplanting set up. I hate to feed the
squirrels any more than we do already, but it is a good learning experience. The biggest drawback would be fending off the
squirrels and building structures for chicken wire is not my idea of a good
time.
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