Saturday GR cut down the last of the trees in the field. It's taken three Saturday's in total to get the job done. Two were dead, and the other two were in the way of his annual fireworks display. Because he was trying to get two trees down in a single day, he asked four friends to help with the project. Five men, three chain saws, two trees. It was a massive undertaking, that took two hours longer than they expected, but they got the job done and we will be forever grateful. The trees were all cut into logs and stacked in the woods for winter firewood. Apparently there is a lot of wood stacked back there ... stacked in six different locations.
If you don't remember what it looked like before. Take a look at the last picture of this post from April, it's taken from about the same spot in the yard.
While the men were taking down trees, I tackled the garden with one of our young women and two of the children who came with their dads. We too had a massive job. In a few short days, the weeds had gone crazy and the garden looked like a jungle. We filled our compost bin with 1/3 of the weeds and filled the wheel barrow with the other 2/3s. It was an impressive pile. After we uncovered all the plants, and I moved a few around to keep them from being crowded out and help to encourage them to grow.
Sadly, we ripped out all of our broccoli. It was a dismal crop ... we grew beautiful foliage, nearly 2 foot tall plants with no flowers ... nothing, not a single sign of flowers at all. So out they went and in went some of my volunteer tomatoes from last years crop, and a couple extra green peppers we started from seed. I have a half dozen or so more volunteer tomatoes that I will likely move into some of my back flower beds to give them space to grow and fill in areas that need plants.
We've been working hard to get all the flower beds cleaned out of weeds. I spent much of the Spring moving plants around and weeding. Unfortunately, once I'd get a spot cleared of weeds, and move on to another spot, a second crop of weeds would emerge. We've enlisted friends, young women and boy scouts in our full on weed war and we're finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel in the front yard. Today two boy scouts and one very dedicated mother finished getting the last of the weeds out of the front beds!
Ashley, the mother of one of the boys, told me about PREEN. They use it on Temple Square. It's a weed preventor, not killer, so I'll likely need to use it in combination with my Round-up, but I'm not kidding when I say this single product may be an answer to prayer and keep me out of the loony bin. It's suppose to prevent weeds for up to 4 months! This coupled with the 10 cubic yards of mulch that was delivered 10 days ago, and we might have a fighting chance at keeping up with at least the front yard. We thought 10 would be plenty, we've spread at least half if not more, and we've covered about that much of the front yard. No where near the entire yard. So we're now hoping it will be enough to mulch the front and south side of the house. Tomorrow I'll order a second load to take care of the play area and backyard beds.
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