35 Weeks - Gardening

Just five weeks to go! Baby is doing great, moving around constantly and we're making a lot of our final prepartions. This week I'll get our bags packed, finish up all the baby laundry and Ned has volunteered to paint the nursery. (Buttery yellow, super cute). Also, we're getting some last house things done, too. We've finally started attacking our sad sack backyard - for the past oh... two years or so, it's looked like renters live here. Maybe even crackhead renters. Not anymore!

We're starting slow, I wanted to keep it affordable and manageable - didn't want to spend beaucoup cash with all the upcoming baby stuff and I also plan on maintaining a lot of the yard ourselves, meaning I need to be able to learn thru trial and error and not just pay someone to install expensive stuff that I kill :)

So... we had our awesome gardener Ernie and his crew come and rip out the last of the saddest plants (some old yucky lantana, gazanias and a bunch of weeds), then add a bunch of fresh new soil, roto-tilled it in so the beds were prepped, install edging AND this week they'll be back to install drip irrigation to all the beds - woohoo!

I have some raised bed planters that will go in, and yesterday Ned and I started the first phase of replanting the beds. In the guest house bed we added a dwarf Valencia orange, some Spanish lavender and a border or drought-tolerant herbs like thyme and oregano. Butterflies and bees seem to love those when they start to flower.

More pics soon - it's a bit cloudy today - but here's what the cleaned-up yard now looks like (oh, on the lattice we'll be doing a grape and maybe some trumpet vines or star jasmine)


Fresh and clean! Now just some nursery trips to start filling it in and making it look presentable :) In the winter, we're getting new sod, too - we have a bad mix of crab grass and yucky stuff that gives me a rash. We need babbeh-friendly soft grass!