Fence and Arbor

Adding a dog to our family lead us to tweak our garden plans.  We've decided to build a fence between the lawn area of our back yard and the side garden.  We also decided to add an arbor with a gate in an attempt to deter Bennet from wandering into our neighbor's yard.

Colin borrowed a post digger to make the holes for the new posts.

The rails are up, ready for pickets.  Thankfully these ones we're not going to paint!

New Raised Beds - The Before and Demo

After many, many years of looking at the ugly flower beds between the driveway and the house, Colin decided it was time to replace them.  Here is how they looked when we bought the house 16 years ago:

Here is how they looked this spring (sorry I didn't take a good before picture before Colin started digging but you can see in the background that they haven't improved much in the last decade and a half):

The stone wall had fallen down.  The day lilies are nice, but they and the crabgrass seem to be the only thing that can grow there.  The azalea there flowers beautifully, if covered in snow all winter, but was very misshapen.  The section by the bulkhead just had weeds.  Three lovely people picked up the day lilies and the azalea.  (Some of the rooted azalea Alyssa transplanted.)  Colin dug out the poor quality soil and hauled it all up into the woods.  We used that dirt to build the new path in the woods (along with the dirt that we had dug out the driveway when making some of the raised beds).

Colin also hauled all the stone and added it the growing rock pile on the side of the house.

When removing the large concrete slabs by the bulkhead, we uncovered an enormous ants nest.

Pulling up Ferns

Our trail in the woods is looking great after our work on the boulder section. The straight shot up the hill is not great, but it is functional. Unfortunately the trail down is impassable after the ferns unfurl. This afternoon Alyssa spent some time pulling ferns and weeds and cutting back some small trees to clear a path once again.