The Front Yard, Part Two

Now that my mom is home from the hospital (she's recovering nicely, thank you), my puppies are hanging in there and all is well on the home front, how's about we take a look at what we've accomplished?  

First - the front yard.

If you recall, several years ago we had (what felt like) thirty feet of snow over the course of a few weeks .

That's a lot of snow.  And it was HEAVY. 

The weight of all that snow crushed a few bushes but we trimmed them back and figured it would take a few years for them to recover. 

Fast forward to Sno-tober...

Obviously the trees and bushes weren't ready for a heavy snow that early in the season (our ONLY snow I might add!) and I think it just did those poor bushes in. 

See those bushes with the pinkish flowers?  They were wonderful but the centers of them were completely crushed and dead.  It wasn't very pretty. 

We also had some bushes here on the interior corner of the walkway which also got completely crushed and were dead. I forgot to take a picture before Brian tore them out (but you can see some of them here). 

They were so damaged that it only took us about 10 minutes to dig them up.  

Sad face. 

The rest of the bushes needed some sprucing up since they were taking over the walkway.  

Of course, the hedge trimmers were broken so  - I trimmed everything by hand. 

I'm not going to tell you how sore my  forearms and wrists were after 6 straight hours of trimming bushes with hedge shears, but lets just I now know what it feels like to be a teenage boy who discovers the lock on the bathroom door and his dad's playboy stash.

That's a shit ton of bushes people. 

In addition to the damage to the bushes, we had four rhododendrons that were in desperate need of help.  The two bigger ones were damaged by the snow and were crowding out two smaller ones and just, in general, weren't doing so well where they were. 

Since it would absolutely  KILL me to destroy them I made Brian dig them up and transplant them. 

He. Was. Not. Happy.

It took him nearly two hours.

Did I mention it was the hottest day of the year?  

Yup, temps in the upper 90s and humidity at like 90%. 

It was gross out. 

Then we dug up all the ivy vines and vinca and cleared out the front bed. 

Once that was done, I went to work on the bushes with the pink flowers. 

Yes, I dug those suckers up.  All. By. Myself. 

Can I get  a "what!what!"

What looked like three, maybe four bushes turned out to be about 10 bushes all growing together in one big cluster-you-know-what.

I didn't necessarily want to get rid of all of them (and some of them were planted way too close to the electric lines for the walkway lights and I didn't want to electrocute myself).

I just wanted to clean it up, tear out the dead ones and  clear the area out by the tree. 

Turned out that at least three of them had rotted to the roots so they popped right out (and landed me on my ass - I wasn't prepared for them to come out so easily and gave them a good hard YANK).

The rest took me all freaking day. 

Some stayed - I kept four and cut them down to the ground so they could start over.

I would have liked to remove that one so close to the walk, but it literally runs right over the electric line for the lights.  

I decided I could live with it.  

They are already showing new growth and should be nice and full looking by next year.

For now, they  look a little sad. 

But the area under the tree is all cleared out, the rhododendrons have been removed and replanted elsewhere (I'll show you where in another post) and the vinca and ivy and dead bushes have all been removed.

And that was just the first day......