Gardening Wars

I bought the house where I live about 2 and 1/2 years ago (before getting married). Before moving in, I had never been a yard person. I grew up on acreage with my family. I mowed the yard a few times with the riding lawn mower but soon got demoted because I have terrible allergies. So yard work has never really been my thing. I remember the first time I went to mow my yard here. I had to call my dad and two of my guy friends to try to figure out how to start the push lawn mower. I swore sweet Dave to secrecy to never tell anyone that we had that conversation because I was embarrassed that I was so clueless when it came to yard work.

 Anyways, that brings me to present day. Ever since I got married (and even while dating) my husband has been talking about these great plans for our yard.

This is a pic of Philip using our new trimmer that we got for Christmas from his parents.

He came home last week telling me about this great AP on his phone where he can take weekly pictures and document the progress of our fertilizer. He is determined to have the greenest yard on the block. Philip came up to me last week and said that he has a secret competition with our neighbors to have a better looking yard. And would you not believe it, but almost every night since he said that our neighbors across the street have been doing yard work up until the wee hours of the night. We came home the other night around 10:30 and I started laughing because the crazy neighbors had taken the fluorescent light (it looked like the kind you find in a kitchen) and set it up on the front porch while they weeded and planted flowers. 

So what did we do...we planted our own garden.

It was so fun. We spent both days of our weekend going to the hardware store nursery, digging up an area, putting down the stones, and planting our plants. It was such a nice change to our backyard that has 0 landscaping. We high fived and patted each other on the back for a job well done. We still wanted to go buy some hydrangea bushes to finish of the flower bed but we had already started dreaming of our next step. We are going to buy a tree that will provide the dogs plenty of shade during the "dog days" of summer.

Wouldn't you know that not two days later our furry children (we are not for sure which one) dug up almost every single one of our flowers. Not only that, but they bit off the bloom of the flowers too. Philip and I came home from doing yard work for the church on Wednesday night. We were in such a good mood and decided to go in the back yard to admire our beautiful work that we had done earlier in the week. When I saw the sight I almost started crying. I know it is irrational but I felt emotional about the situation. All of our hard work was gone and I felt like the hope of ever having a beautiful yard went out the window too. After letting a few days go by so that I wasn't wanting to kill our dogs I joked with Philip that our dogs were moles...working for the neighbors. It was a sneaky ploy to keep us down in the garden wars. The Meadows will fight back. After all, gardening is almost in our name.

Have a blessed week everyone.