Yard Projects

How many screws can one deck really have??????

..Before

After....
you are looking at the start of my overwhelming bed, it will go from the house to almost the back of the lot

My new shade bed! It will be more exciting next year I promise.

So, it's been a month since our last post.....we sure are slacking since we've gotten back!
The fall was the magic time when we were going to put all of our landscaping schemes into play and it's fall!!!!! I have been collecting plants for the last several months, going to various nurseries with display gardens, reading a lot of books from the library. My list of plants usually consist of things that no normal person has heard of such as bugbane, goatsbeard, amsonia, umbrella plant, oak leaf hydrangea.....Most nurseries don't carry such things. I also had a nursery that Matt and I babied thru the whole summer, 45 plants started from seed and ready to go into the ground!
I got my shade bed planted this last week! It has been a barren wasteland of dirt this whole summer. The bed receives no rain water during the summer because of the trees above it so everything in it died when we had renters......The rest of our yard fared pretty well so we can't feel to bad for ourselves. :-) It was fun to plan out my little bed and collect the plants for it. It is not as intimidating as my next bed. That one will be 80 feet long and 15 feet wide in some spots. I have to admit that I am a little overwhelmed by such a large bed and my plant collection for if consists of probably more this 50 plants and shrubs......plus more on my "must have" list. Why, oh why didn't I go to school for plants???? :-p
The biggest project is ripping out the deck and putting in pavers........the deck is gone, we are going to use the wood to build our raised vegetable beds. We found enough pavers to get the side yard done (25 cents a piece instead of 2 or 3.....steal of a deal!) the patio will wait until we have some experience under our belts.
Other then that, we have been getting to see some more of our friends these past couple of weeks which has been grand! I was very busy last week working my normal job and then the "Oktoberfest" (Well, I wasn't actually busy at the fest but I was working so that made me "busy," My elbows got so soar from constantly having to hold that bar down!)

We started playing volleyball with the SVA league again. People were excited to have us back and it was good to see so many familiar faces. We are actually First place in the entire league after last weeks score. That wont last long though....we played some pretty sad teams the first week and this coming week we should be with teams closer to our own level. We have a fun group of players on our team and we should have a great season.

We also had a our first 5th grade Sunday school class today. The lesson was on how to help your friends when they're in trouble. I looked at Matt and said, "I don't think we're teaching first grade anymore!!!!!" We were really encouraged by how the kids shared today and look forward to getting to know them better over the next year.

That is my novel for now. I will try and post updates of our yard and such a little more regularly but that's not a promise. :-p