It's all plot.

This is what my yard looked like in June of 2011. Isn't it gorgeous and lush and amazing? We had watered nothing, in fact we had been gone for 6 weeks, and our good friend and contractor had mowed for us, in the narrow window that it was dry enough. It rained a LOT last year,

Now the thing is, it looks really pretty in this picture. Hell, it took my breath away after 6 weeks in Southern Arizona.

But that's a lot of over grown plants. They are starting to choke each other out and invade into the yard, and so the time has come for me to go to war with the plant life. It's for its own good, honest.

I have no pictures of the front yard, sadly, because the transformation out there has been amazing. We basically had a thicket growing on the front corner, and our contractors very kindly took it all out using chain saws. It took them half a day. Two of them. With chainsaws. The pile of branches and trunks is epic. (And hopefully gone soon. Because the neighbors are starting to look at us funny. Oops.)

Anyway, this is largely for my own amusement, a retrospective of what the yard has looked like the last few years, so this June I can compare and see if I did good, or just, you know, made a total mess of things. :D

( There's a bunch of large pictures of my yard under here. )

So there you have it. My green and rather lovely but horrifically over grown yard. I promise I'll take more pictures when it grows in. :)

(Part one, Part two.)

OH MY GOD, YA'LL. I AM TIRED.

Is chives, not onions.

Also, daffodils. The bulbs look like white onions? It's bizarre.

Homeowner hauled off BAGS full of bulbs.

I still have a BILLION.

I put them on Craigslist, hope people come and take them. I HAVE NO ROOM IN MY TRASHCANS.

( Pictures! )

And now, I'm going to go shower the mud off. And try not to fall asleep before the sun goes down. Heh

Yesterday was an awesomely productive day, and it included getting started on over hauling my flower beds.

I did not put the bed in, and I have largely ignored it since we move in a year ago. But during the glorious snowy winter I began daydreaming about how pretty it could be with some TLC.

It's been neglected for a long time, and so the irises and random tulips living there have pretty much started choking themselves out. Purple irises are my favorite flower of all time, I adore them, which I include only as a data point to highlight how ugly they must be when *I* say "they aren't even pretty irises."

So, I am digging the whole mess up and starting from scratch.

I started digging yesterday. And wow. So I didn't know plants could actually get root bound in the GROUND. I am going to have to buy more soil because the roots and bulbs are such a knotted dense mess I'm pulling out almost a foot deep and there's very little dirt left behind.

But I think it will be worth it.

( Pictures! )

Part two...