We're remodeling our back yard this year!

It starts next week - having three small trees removed from the left side of the house.  Two of them are sweetgum trees that just matured enough to start dropping those annoying "gumballs" all over the place.  I hate those things!  In the place of these three trees will be a nice unobnoxious River Birch.

Next - hopefully this weekend - we're going to tear down Emily's playset.  Adrienne's mom has requested the wood.  I'm pretty sure this custom made set couldn't be sold anyway.

In place of the playset, we're going to build a shed and some raised bed gardens and a walkway between the gardens.

We'd like to expand the left side of the deck to the edge of the house - and expansion of about 8'x12', and move the stairway to the otherside of the deck.  On that side, we're putting a patio, which will probably be in the neighborhood of 12x14, and may be as simple as poured or stamped concrete, or maybe even pavers if I'm feeling anbitious.

And finally, once all this is done, the rest of the back yard will be sodded with a nice heat tolerant "summer" grass - probably Bermuda.

Sounds like a lot of work doesn't it?

Some of you already know that I've gone a little crazy this year with gardening and other yardwork this spring. 

Adrienne and I had a small garden four or so years ago but found it difficult to maintain, neither of us had much time to do the things that are required to keep a good garden (like weeding).  Also, the garden was a bit on the crowded side.  We haven't really done anything since, until this year.

This year, it really started with me picking up some Elyeagnus (Ebbing's Silverberry) to put in the wild area between my house and the neighbors house.  Adrienne's mom is doing some volunteer work at Plant's Delight Nursery, and planted some other stuff in the wild area at the front corner of the yard, That's what really set me off, because I wanted some kind of symetry, so I ended up getting some Frost Proof Gardenias, and put in a nice little cast aluminum fencing (about 8" tall) in front of the Indian Hawthornes that I planted several years ago.  Eventually I also added some Cat Mint (aka Catnip) between the hawthorn's, and that side of the wild area looks a hundred times better.

We also took the small banana out of the ground and put it in a very large pot (along with some red and purple gladiola bulbs), and purchased a new banana tree at the farmers market, and put that in a more appropriately sized pot as well.  The old banana was replaced with a Camellia.  Apparently we didn't get the entire banana root structure out because a baby banana is coming up next to the camellia.

We picked upa nice black bench with a kind of arbor over the top and put it out by the front corner, under one of the trees, and Adrienne put up the "School Bus Stop" sign that she'd bought like 4 years ago.

That covers most of the non-garden related landscaping we did this spring, and I think I'll write a whole separate entry about the gardens.