Landscaping With a Gel Manicure

The trouble with a new house. . . you have to start from scratch with your landscaping to make it yours; to give it your stamp, your mark.  Landscaping this house is . . .WAY harder than it was when we were landscaping our first house.

Two things make it harder:
1) we have kids.  Shockingly, they are not really into hours of manual labor.  "Our" ideas (really they're my ideas and Doug is grudgingly going along with them) are taking us days.
2) age.  I'm not as good as I was in my twenties.

The first spot we landscaped in our yard, was a breeze.  It took a few hours, a few plants, and a few bales of pine needles.  I don't even think we broke a sweat.  However, it was so satisfying because FINALLY I had azaleas back in my yard.  I learned to garden in the south.  We like azaleas.  I've only just gotten started.  My side yard is going to be FULL of azaleas.  Slam full of them!

This spot . . . well, here's the before.

We have drainage issues.  And by that I mean- we have a sloped yard and the water is running towards our fence (on the right).  I'm currently on a quest to control the run off.  In order to do this I've decided we need a dry creek bed, and plants that are good for soaking up the water. Hopefully that will help because this spot has a lot of run off.  

We went Friday afternoon- when all of the major roads in our town were experiencing excessive traffic due to a couple of road closures- and picked up 1 1/2 tons of river rock.  Then we came home and started digging out the area where we wanted the bed.  It sounds so easy . . . until Saturday morning when the humidity and heat were back.  I was a SWEATY mess.  We continued digging out the area, put down some landscape fabric,  and then we started moving the rock.  Pretty much we moved the rock by hand.  We moved it from Doug's trailer to a small trailer that Andrew pulled behind the lawnmower.  Then we unloaded the trailer.  We did that for 1 1/2 tons of rock.  Did you hear that? 1. 1/2. tons.  

Side note: Knowing that this was going to be an all day event, and that Alexa, in particular, would NOT be into this (she's not really into outside, or yard work). I came up with a list of things for her to do.  Some of the list were chores and some were things she would actually want to play, but I was afraid if I wasn't paying 100% attention, she would pass then entire day in front of the television.  She was awesome.  She did a lot of the things on her list.  EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. we asked her to fetch us water - she did.  She stopped what she was doing, got us water, and went back to her thing. Even though she wasn't outside helping- she helped a lot in a different way.  

We're still not done, but . . . we're closer.  Here's what we got done: 

Mmm- it doesn't look like much.  And we had a torrential rain storm last evening that showed me I needed to make the top wider, because the rain sort of flowed next to the dry creek bed . . . not through it.  Today I widened the top, then planted a bunch of plants along the side.  Tomorrow . . . I need more rocks.   

I won't lie.  My 41 year old arms say, they're tired.  And my finger tips are hurting.  And I'm pooped. However, the good news is my gel manicure that I got 6 days ago . . . is still hanging on! I've never gotten a gel manicure before.  That is the ticket!!!  I LOVE it.  I will definitely be getting another one of those, I think I'll wait until I don't have huge landscaping plans though.  

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