Year of the Yard part one

When we were lucky enough to buy the house we live in now, I had three thoughts:
1. This house has SIX (potential) bedrooms. Yahoo!! That means we can have more babies!!

2. With this house we double our square footage, thereby giving us more space to put our stuff! We could NEVER fill up all this space! (turns out we filled it up immediately--all we had to do was find a place for all the things I had stored like a brainteaser puzzle in our previous house. We just spread them out a bit...)

3. This house sits on a HALF-ACRE!!! I can't wait to fill up that half-acre with plants rather like I had the closets of our old house filled up! Y'know--EVERY INCH!!

So I went to sleep at night with all my plans and good intentions swimming 'round my head. Well......turns out that a half-acre is a lot of land. Especially when you don't have a sprinkling system, and you get pregnant and have two babies in the space of 3 1/2 years. And you let the yard go the first summer only to realize that the lush, green yard you fell in love with will now take many summers to get back. SIGH!!! Turns out the way to do this is to tackle it like eating an elephant.....one bite at a time. You have no idea how much this pains me. Apparently I crave order more than I thought I did and to not be able to "whip my yard into shape" like I want drives me NUTS!! Oh well...might as well get started!



Last year we dug out and amended the front flower beds next to the sidewalks. I sent away for some bulbs and shade plants and got them in the ground while I could still bend over.....however; apparently tilling gave new life to all the grape hyacinth I thought I had killed with Round-up. For those of you who don't know, grape hyacinth is an innocuous-looking little purple flower that comes from a bulb. Being a purple-lover, you'd think that it would elate me to know that I had inherited such a BOUNTY of purpleness......

Not so. Let me illustrate.....



Observe how the grape hyacinth foliage blends seamlessly into the grass beyond.....That's because it is as THICK as the grass beyond!!!!!

Here is more of a close-up:



This is my son who sold his soul to me for the price of Guitar Hero. He gets to help me in the yard. Hehehehe!!



This is what grape hyacinth bulbs do when nobody's looking.....





Do you see that unholy large bulb in the middle? That is the culprit!!! One bulb like that let loose and it's all over!!!

These bulbs must be STOPPED!! We dug and dug and dug. We filled a two-gallon bucket four times with the little buggers!! And now......



An almost clean slate with which to create!! Now only 54/55ths of an acre to go!!