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.

Snow Day

Like I said yesterday, I love snow. I know not everyone does, but I do. Even when we had over 2 feet of the white & fluffy on the ground last year, I didn't care. I love snow. Maybe it's because school has been my full time job for as long as I can remember, whether I'm a teacher or a student, so snow means sleeping in or a day spent snuggled up on the couch with a hot drink (hot chocolate when I was little, tea in high school, now coffee) watching the flakes quietly fall to the ground.

I think I also like how quiet everything gets when it snows. Everything slows down. And what I've always found funny is that snow is that we always end up talking to our neighbors when it snows, because we're all out there shoveling and you wave, say hello, talk about the snow and how it's changed our plans for the day.

But possibly one of my favorite things about snow is how pretty it makes everything. All covered in crisp, clean white. All the leafless trees and gray landscape of winter in Maryland is covered up and it's just so nice to look at. At least for the first few days, eventually the salt and plows and traffic and shoveling kick up the dirt onto the snow, and it melts in patches, and it's not so nice.

It snowed here last night. And we got just enough to cover everything, but not enough that it's a pain to shovel or terribly inconvenient. The plows kept up with it (even ahead of it) so the roads are clear. Perfect snow? I think a about 3 more inches would have been even better, but then, I love snow. While everything was nice and clean this morning, I just had to go out and take some pictures of the house covered in snow.

I look at this picture and think about painting the outside of the house. Eventually, we'll do it. I needs it, the shutters are all bleached out and it's overall painfully bland.

One of my favorite things about our house in the snow is our evergreen trees in the front yard.

They are beautiful when covered in snow. Sadly, it never lasts long on them, the wind blows the snow off and the branches bend and it just falls off. They had more than this on them this morning, but I'm glad I got in a picture before it was all gone.