2-bath day

Neighborhood
Originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Yesterday was a 2-bath day at the Maynard household. Since I pretty much spend the entire weekend at home, and since Brenden loooooves the outdoors, I decided it would be a good time to do some work on our badly neglected landscaping. I decided to start by weeding and raking around the bushes in the front yart and spreading new mulch. I especially wanted to lay new mulch down because the previous owner used some sort of water permeable tarp around the bushes and a lot of it is uncovered because the last mulch is totally decomposed/washed away.

Brenden and I drove to Home Depot where I bought a few miscellaneous tools we didn't have and 3 bags of pretty red wood mulch. I figured I would need more but this is a long-term project because 1) it's too hot to stay outdoors for very long 2) I have to keep an eye on Brenden and 3) because I have to keep an eye on Brenden, I don't want to use any power tools so that I can hear him as well.

So yesterday I start raking around the weedy-looking and overgrown bushes to the right of our porch, and I finally discovered where all those freakin ants come from when they invade our house. There was so much leaf/compost buildup around the base of the plants they were living in there! Thank goodness these ants don't bite otherwise B and I would be in poor shape. So I didn't even get around spreading the wood chips - I cleaned up as best as I could and Jon should spray near the base and kill all those farging bastiches. I hope to get out there this evening and spread.

Brenden of course helped a lot, mainly by pulling clods of dirt up and tasting them. Oh, well - parasites can be removed. I grew up on a tropical island so I know all about parasites. Brenden of course helped rake and sweep; he spent a lot of time in the open garage where it was substantially cooler investigating everything in there (I spent Saturday cleaning up the garage so that Brenden wouldn't try to eat any spiders he found).

I'm making tentative plans to rip up the whole farging front landscaping this winter, and replacing the poorly-laid plastic border (ick) and the tarp (double-ick) and replacing it with a nicer brick border. I'll also do some initial prepping of the ground to get it ready for some new plants in the spring. I need to take photos so we can have a before-after comparison. As you can see from the above photo, we have a ginormous oak tree in our lawn with a very scraggly-looking area underneath. Poor watering and zero shade caused that. I'm still working out what I'm going to do about this area. The tree stays - it's huge, beautiful and in great shape. It definitely needs some pruning but that should be done when it's colder.

And then there's the landscaping around the pool - I'm going to wait for at least a year before I attempt to tackle it because I hope by then Brenden will have enough sense not to fall into the pool.