Out back at our house

After a long, unannounced hiatus I'm sure you're all waiting with baited breath to see what's going on around our house.

And when I say "unannounced hiatus" I mean I didn't make time for blogging and that I was generally ashamed at the lack of work going on with the house. Now that I'm on Summer break, hopefully posting will go back to being much more regular.

We've been taking a break from decorating the office to work on the back yard.  Our back yard is, in short, a jungle. It would be one giant hill sloping toward the house, but at some point someone who owned the property installed terracing. Lots of it. Climbing up and down the terraces can make gardening a challenge.

The previous owner, as far as we've culled from our nieghbors, didn't do a whole lot to keep it landscaped. Understandable. Maryland summers are hot and humid and generally unpleasant to do any work in. Also, our back yard has insane mosquitoes, double trouble. Last summer was incredibly hot here, so we didn't do anything in the yard either. But this year, we decided to take advantage of the Spring weather to start clearing out the mess and putting down new landscaping cloth and mulch. Who knows how much we'll get done this summer, but the point is, we've started and we're really happy with our progress, even though we're not actually planting anything just yet.

Anyway, here's how it looked when we started. 

Yes, very green, but very overgrown as well. Here's where we're at now, after several weekends of tearing stuff out and putting down mulch.

 

Much less green, sure, but we'll get to that in the future. It doesn't help that lack of rain has sort of fried the grass, too. We are not believers in watering the lawn. 

I made a slide show of our progress. We didn't do it all in one go, for sure. We've been tackling the terraces in sections, so here it is one section at a time. 

We saved the few plants that are decent looking, including a couple of evergreen shrubs, some kind of shrub of unknown variety, some vine-y things growing on the terrace walls and a hydrangea that I bought last year and never planted and somehow it was still alive this Spring even though it sat in pot on our patio for 6-9 months.

We've got a whole lot left to do, for sure. But we're happy that SOMETHING is getting done. We've got plans to put in bushes, take out some trees, and even have a small portion of the terraces devoted to growing vegetables and herbs. We are both fiends for rosemary, and used to have a huge rosemary plant in the yard, but it didn't make it when we transplanted it 2 Autumns ago.