The Back Yard, Again

Here's another one of my yard projects... the cactus "garden." Do those two words even go together, at all??



Can you say "child health hazard" three times fast? It's one of Ethan's favorite places to try exploring, which of course means I have an attack of the crazies every time I see him get near it. I want to get a fence around it that has openings too small for Ethan's hands to fit through, and is sturdy enough to stand up to any pushing or shoving that he might do in an attempt to dive headfirst into the cactus area. In my dreams, I'd rip it all out and make it into a fire pit or something, but since this is a rental house I figured that I should probably just make it less accessible to a curious toddler. Though a backard fire pit would be kind of cool...



Anyway, dreams are nice because there is always a possibility of one day seeing them come true, but for now you don't have to worry about actually putting them into action. At least our roses are doing well, after Joel's tender ministrations put them back into good health.



Still have a ton of work to do on the yard, but seeing these little things improve gives me the energy to put my shoulder to the wheel and keep pushing.

Weeds Begone

Ever since we moved in, the back yard has been a disaster. Every so often we go all out and try to spruce it up, but we're hesitant to put too much money into it because it's only a rental. Now that Ethan's up and walking around and able to play back there, though, I've developed a newfound motivation to work in the yard. One of my first goals is to deal with this type of crabgrass-weed-scratchy-yuck that is carpeting the "lawn."



I can't stand it! It's so rough that you can hardly walk on it without discomfort. I decided to weed a bit:



And ended up with bare dirt, because pretty much anything that was green was a nasty weed. As one of my friends mentioned, it'll make a lot of great compost!



It'll have to do, until I can figure out what type of ground cover I can put down there instead. For now, he loves to dig in the dirt and make little piles everywhere, so at least he's enjoying the fruits of my labor.