Starting from scratch

When Duff and I bought our house, we knew that the yard was something of a jungle. Over the last year, we've trimmed and pruned in an attempt to keep things under control. But this past weekend, we decided that the numerous flower beds, bushes and trees were just too much maintenance for two young working professionals. So we decided to scale back.

Our main targets were the bushes. Our yard has several large bushes that have probably never been trimmed in their at least twenty years of existence. They have have bases the size of tree trunks. They tower over my head. And they just had to go.

So to reach our goal to simplify and beautify, the bushes were not so peacefully laid to rest.

This was the bush from the front of the house. This picture is from February and the bush grew probably two feet since then. It was so large, it was starting to dwarf the front windows and was beginning to tower over us on our way to and from the cars. After trimming back the branches, we found that this bush is actually three bushes that grew together over the years. Now, they are back to being three normal sized bushes.

They obviously still need to grow in a bit.

Next, we attacked the bushes around the side of the house. This area is the overgrown jungle of the yard. That hasn't changed too much, except now its a much shorter and more contained overgrown jungle. For example:

Here is the side of the house with bushes.

And here is what it looks like now, sans bushes.


We also shortened this flower bed--sorry, Beemie.

And the other side of the house went from over-crowded to nice and airy.

Crowded:


Airy:

So our simplify and beautify plan is now in place. The plan will continue next spring when we begin the new planting and mulching phase.

Our work was also partially inspired by necessity--it was needed in a few places to help with our next super big, OMG, house-changing project. But I can't tell you about that yet...