May 26th - Take that Weeds!

Alright. It's happened. The bulk of the weeding is finished. Now it's just keeping them AWAY. Let's take a look at our checklist, shall we?

Weeding the yard and parking strips
Digging out the trenches we dug last year
(Deciding if we need all the trenches we have or need to make a few new ones)
Putting in the sprinklers (pipes and heads)
Keeping the weeds away
De-rocking the yard
Installing sod
Installing trees, plants and bushes

All the weeds left are in the trenches which will be dug out so who cares about pulling them by hand. Amiright? 

Before and afters, please.

Look out trenches, I'm coming for you.

May 23rd - Creeping Up on the Weeds

One park strip at a time. All this week while, Skylar is working, I've been out in the yard. Weeding, raking, tilling, trying to make some progress on the sad condition of our once weedless yard. But we continue on! 

Today almost felt like when we were back working on the houses. We had a goal, we worked until we were done and it felt like we made a decent amount of progress. Our old supervisor Nathan just happened to be visiting a friend in our neighborhood so he even stopped by!

So here is our checklist as far as I know:

Digging out the trenches we dug last year
(Deciding if we need all the trenches we have or need to make a few new ones)
Putting in the sprinklers (pipes and heads)
Keeping the weeds away
De-rocking the yard
Installing sod
Installing trees, plants and bushes

Somewhere in there we also want to dig out the backyard. We'll use some of that dirt to fill in areas that aren't quite high enough for level ground so that needs to come just before installing sod. 

Progress. Progress.

The yard up until Tuesday

What is left (not doing all of it this year)

The front park strip

One of the other park strips

Last park strip

Mid-raking of the front park strip

After picture: looking good

Freaking weeds

Just the beginning of the pile...

May 9th - Readying the Yard

The title is somewhat redundant, since we've been readying the yard for a year now. But really what it's coming down to is getting rid of weeds, rocks and trying to keep those things at bay until we lay (drum roll, please) SOD! 

We had Jen Klingonsmith from Saratoga Blooms come and do a yard consultation for us. She is fantastic. It's more difficult to grow in Saratoga Springs because of the salinity of the secondary water and because the ground itself hasn't been worked like other areas in Utah County. For that reason she has a list of tried and true plants that grow in our area. Not only that but she designs a landscape for your yard that you can implement at your pace. So now we're in the process of getting sod, trees and possibly shrubs if we have funds for that. We're just doing the front right now but hoping to get the back done next year.

Right now we're trying to finish digging out the backyard how we want, getting all the areas leveled out that we will be finishing up this summer, installing sprinklers and we'll see from there.

After tilling one side of the front yard

The park strip. Yikes

The other side before tilling

After raking/wedding

After raking and weeding the other side

The back yard that we have left. We burned all the tumbleweeds and it made room for all the new weeds to come in. Never ends.