Spring II and the results of last year

Hey All,

Spring 2014 is around the corner, hope you aren't too upset for losing an hour of sleep.  Last year project has already been completed. However, the results are not that bad, but not up to par. Hopefully I have pictures up soon for you to see the results of our project.

Unfortunately, I have a conflict of interest with my father about how to go about gardening. My father basically thinks he is on a farm, except he plants anywhere. I mean anywhere. Last year, in the summer, he got bamboos and started tying it to the fence and to the remaining trees. It was quite embarrassing. I think our neighbors were very much confused as well, so I was like great. Go away nosy neighbors!

By the end of last fall we had got a good sum of grass back, with no weeds. I would have to say we still need a lot more though. I think by the end of March we'll be getting into the season, but that all depends on the weather and if the snow will call it a day. Go away snow!

Contracting problems

Tip for those of you who are thinking about getting yard work done. Put your plans in words. Poor communication skills can ruin a project. Our first team bailed on us. I do not know the details about the project, but more or less my parents were not satisfied with the quality of the work and that they wished to see better results. Well, this had the contractor and his crew just leave our yard just half way done. My brother is furious at the results. Although, I am furious because I mentioned to my parents that having both our front yard and our backyard completed at the same time would be too much of a hassle. Especially considering the kind of work that my parents wanted.

I told my parents just get the weeds out and put new grass in. No, that would not suffice for them. When they do something, they do it big without thinking it through. It's embarrassing. I hate being the only voice of logic- also logic does not work in my household.

So as of right now, our front yard is just dirt. Our backyard is dirt with a pile stones and two huge drenches, yes drench like in World War II, running from one end to another.

Day 34: Construction Site

So we had people over today. It was interesting.

Craziness right? I think mom wants a step, however, I hope she doesn't want one in the middle of the yard. It  would make our yard look really small. 

Three Weeks Later: Making Grass

Update on the yard.
So we went to Home Depot. I got the soil. Put one bag onto the ground then put some grass seeds. That did  nothing. After a week, still nothing. So sad.

Any way Mom and Dad got quotes from two landscape contractors.
One said $5000. The other said, $8000.
I'm not sure if they got what they both wanted, but we went with the $5000 job.

Day 4: Home Depot

Today I went to Home depot.
I also just wrote this post, but Blogger did not save it :(
Basically, I would have to pay $404 to cover half of my backyard in potting soil. That's not going to happen. That number was generated by the cost of the store brand soil ($2) times the guesstimated cubic feet of half of my yard, so I'm hoping the generated number is bloated.

I'm going to spend $25 on soil and hope that we will be okay. I'm going to have to convince the parents however to do so.

Day 3: Yard Plan

Today, I found a dime. 

Here are the trees that I was wrote about earlier. Another name for these guys are weed trees. They weren't meant to be there, but they are there. This root is particularly large.

 This is a top bottom view of the hill. If you can tell, there are ditches in the ground. Hill is quite steep as is, but the ditches/ unevenness makes it even more dangerous to go downhill.

 
Here you can see a stone. Now this rock can pretty much kill a lawn mower, but there is a very good reason for this stone to be here. It holds as a barrier for all the dirt above it from falling down and causing a major mudslide. When we put our potting soil down we need to be especially careful about this area and make sure that 1- we create a strong layer between the stone and the lawnmower and 2- lawnmower blades are sharp so that they do not pull roots and dirt up, thus destroying the layer between itself and the stone.

 Below: roots of a tree. Need to have a lot of dirt to cover it up so we can have an even lawn.

This is the side of our house. The consistency of our dirt is completely different here. We might have to get the pH of this stuff checked. It is basically like sand.

  Here is a weed tree that I pulled out.  You can see all of its roots.

Here is a basic yard plan. This is the original layout.The brown patches are what are supposed to be mulch areas.  I have sectioned off the lawn into seven parts and the mulch areas into 8. Below is the color code. For the most part the mulch areas do not need as much attention, but they do need work, however, they are not my priority.

red- Highly severe amount of work: uneven ground, fallen trees,weeds, moss- will cost a lot of $
orange- Medium amount of work: weeds, uneven ground, composition of soil is hard to work with- will cost some $
yellow- Some load of work- Will cost possibly a little more than a handful of $
light green- little bit of work: just needs some weeds pulled out, soil-just needs $ for some soil and seeds
dark green- Okay load of work: Just needs $ for some soil and seeds.

Like I said sections 8-15 are not a priority, but I also know that my parents like to plant their own stuff, thus I will not even bother for the most part with Sections 12, 13, some of 14 and 5.

Section 5 is where my parents dug that ditch. Fixing that would cost a lot of soil that I do not know where to get right now.  I will have to check soil prices.

Day 2: Vines and Trees

Today, I discovered that we have actual baby trees growing in our back yard. We did not plant these trees. Their seeds must have planted themselves some long time ago. Some of them can be taken out easily. Some of them have died out already due to the poor soil and  lack of protection from the weather. Trees are usually brought up in nurseries. However, some brave the weather and the soil and their roots have embedded themselves deep into the ground. Unfortunately, we will have to pull these guys out because they are in the middle of the lawn. It will just take a lot of effort.

We have ground covers on the sides of our back yard. They have over grown and have weeded out into the lawn area. So I had to trim them. However, there is a lot of trimming that I have to do. I will take pictures tomorrow.