I mentioned last week that Mike and I had spent some time in the front yard clearing the death. Though we haven’t had a chance to do much other than just making it look not-bad, I figured I’d share some pictures until it looks just plain old good. So here we go, in mostly pictures 🙂

Two out of three bushes dead! Still thinking of what to replace them with…

The other side at least had some signs of life coming up in the middle of all that death.

Plus some mum skeletons mixed in.

But! The two hydrangeas we planted last year are sprouting up! I was a little worried about them because we planted them late. They had beautiful blue flowers on them, then we got hit with a killer heat wave in early June and all of the flowers fell off 🙁 The leaves stayed green, but they didn’t bloom ever again. Hopefully this year I can have flowers for long enough to put some around the house!

Hot mess going on in our little island garden.

So I gave them a little (okay a lot of) a haircut. That’s Mike in the background dealing with our dead patches of sod, from above mentioned heat wave last year.

Then I pulled out all of the plant skeletons.

And things started looking much better!

Reseeded (and thanks to the rain this week, it’s green now!)

So now we just need to keep seeding our hearts out, doing rain dances (for the grass and the hydrangeas!), hunt down some replacement plants and freshen up the mulch in some spots and we’re good to go! 🙂

This weekend, Mike and I spent some time outside cleaning up the front yard. It was a rough winter and 3 of our shrubs didn’t make it through. Okay, they were dead last summer but we kept hoping they’d come back to life. A quick clean up turned into digging up things and sore arms and legs, but in the midst of the death I spotted this.

You see that? It’s spring.

And with spring comes the end of the semester crunch, which unfortunately has smacked me in the face this week. I have so many house stories to tell, and my “things to post about list” has been growing and growing, but my carpal tunnel is telling me to quit for the night. Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer to me and also Mike will be back at some time this week with another manly post . He said I should rename this blog to Mike’s Lil House That Could with all of the posts he’s been writing. No no, this is still my gig! But I am very thankful that he’s willing to help out around here when I’m drowning in homework 🙂